Perfect Poise
here is no other way to say this. But Shobhana Bhartia is a very good looking woman in a very Audrey Hepburn-kind of way: slender, graceful and classy with a pixie hair cut that completes the elf-like image. Add to this her easy demeanour — unassuming way with people and propensity to let her team run their ships on their own terms — and it is entirely possible to imagine an unlikely publisher in a business otherwise populated by extraordinarily mercurial, passionate and colourful characters.
Take her counterpart Samir Jain at the Times of India for instance. People who have seen him at close quarters describe him as disarmingly charming, gracious to a fault, wickedly funny – traits, however, that are completely overpowered by the sheer weight of genius he carries and his notorious reclusiveness. His flagship brands, the Times of India and the Economic Times are modelled almost exclusively on his view of the world.
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Image: Madhu Kapparath for Forbes India
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Chairperson and editorial director of the Hindustan Times group | |
On the road to dominance through most of the Nineties and the early part of this decade, he uprooted many fondly held assumptions in the publishing business. The five Ds of Indian Express — death, decay, destruction, disaster and disease — as he liked to call them, make for compelling stories that win prizes. “But hard news is inversely related to advertising,” he once wrote in a note to his editors. Therefore, the argument went, it is important to strip content of the five Ds and replace it with celebration as the central theme. That his ideas have worked is now beyond doubt and publishers and editors across the world look at Samir Jain’s intellectual bandwidth with both awe and envy.
For that matter there is Aveek Sarkar of the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazaar Patrika. The Renaissance Man, as he is called, Sarkar is an authority on practically everything under the sun. A connoisseur of the fine things in life, he too, like Samir Jain, runs his flagship publications, the Bengali language Ananda Bazaar Patrika and the Telegraph in his own image. It may have cost him the numbers and top line growth, but Aveekbabu isn’t the kind of man who gives a damn.
Then there is Aroon Puri of the Living Media group. A chartered accountant-turned publisher, 34 years after founding the company, he continues to be editor-in-chief of the company’s magazines. In all these years, recalls a senior associate, not a single page in its flagship India Today has ever gone into print without him having gone over it with a fine tooth comb — whether he is on vacation in the Bahamas or recouping at home from a bad bout of flu. To that extent, his job is a remarkably tough one. The buck stops at his table both when it comes to editorial focus and revenue generation.
The point here is simple: As a thumb rule, in the publishing business, newspapers and magazines are proxies for their publisher’s personalities. But if you were to go by this thumb rule, Shobhana Bhartia is schizophrenic. To get a sense of that, take a look first at HT Media’s flagship publications,
Hindustan Times (HT) and Mint.
The former, an English broadsheet, has over the last couple of months under a new editor, Sanjoy Narayan, gone through dramatic changes in terms of its editorial focus. It has worked hard at acquiring a peppier new look and an editorial focus that appeals to a generation that places a premium on snappy content. I conducted a very unscientific, quick dipstick poll with a few young people between 23 and 27. They unanimously voted in favour of the new look and feel.
The latter, a business newspaper, was the first Berliner in the country. Launched in association with the Wall Street Journal, Mint is as different from Hindustan Times, to borrow a cliché, as chalk is from cheese. Its umbilical cords severed from that of the parent, it caters to an audience favourably disposed towards reading. Since its launch in February 2007, first to derision and then to critical acclaim, it has cemented its position as the second largest selling business paper in the country behind the Economic Times.
That said, let’s get this right first. Bhartia isn’t schizophrenic. She is just playing to a plan.
Her father, late K.K. Birla, insisted she spend a few years in the backseat, understanding the business. And so Shobhana Bhartia opted to spend time at the Washington Post. When she finally got home and assumed charge, she had a few notions on what a newspaper ought to be like, largely fashioned by her days at the Post.
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Raju Narisetti
Editor Mint June 2006-Jan 2009.
