Perfect Poise
Instead, she found herself pitted against well-entrenched unions that opposed anything and everything she believed in. She couldn’t figure out, for instance, why workers at the press ought to be fed milk three times a day. Neither could she understand why modernisation was viewed with suspicion. “Newspapers in India,” she says, “were not meant to be well run businesses, but a cause.” Those were different times, a socialist time.
Flustered, often at a loss in the early years, and at times convinced by the end of it all she would be shorn of all the idealism she had gotten into the business with, Bhartia learnt her lessons well.
For one, she was convinced professionalising the place was the way to go. She admits she made a few mistakes on the way. And that she has had to make a few unpleasant course corrections. But that is par for the course. “I view it as a personal failure if I cannot identify the right talent to run the place. Once I’ve done that, I don’t believe in breathing down their backs. I think it undermines them,” she says.
In some sense, that explains why the Hindustan Times and Mint are such different animals. HT is something she inherited. It came with all the attendant baggage and legacy issues that she has battled to change. It is only over the last couple of years that Bhartia and her editors have been able to hammer it into a shape they believe is closer to the India we live in.
Mint, on the other hand, is the outcome of a different era and a different Shobhana Bhartia. “I am a more idealistic person now,” she says. That is why when the company thought up a plan to launch a new business paper, she was clear it would have to be insulated from everything she had battled in the past. So she did everything differently; from identifying Raju Narisetti as editor, then with Wall Street Journal to housing the new operation in an altogether new office. “We wanted a certain kind of professionalism. That is not to say HT isn’t professional. But there were mindset issues,” she says.
True to her promise, she let Narisetti create a dramatically different newsroom culture and a newspaper quite unlike anything readers of Indian business have seen. And to her credit, when detractors kept insisting it was only a matter of time before the project would have to be abandoned on the face of mounting losses and hopeless economic conditions, she gritted her teeth and backed her team to deliver. Mint’s losses are now in single-digit crores and close to turning in operational profits.
By all accounts, Hindustan, the Hindi newspaper she backed, is clearly the fastest growing in its genre. It isn’t as if all is smooth sailing for her. Her online attempts are still bleeding. “It bothers me,” she says. “But nobody in the world has thought up a viable business model yet.” As for the radio business that HT Media has gotten into, while the stations are doing reasonably well, verdict on the business is still not out. But as she says, “This India allows me to dream. I now have a right to dream and I must.”
Quote
I view it as a personal failure if I cannot identify the right talent to run the place - Shobhana Bhartia
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Raju Narisetti
Editor Mint June 2006-Jan 2009.
