There is a vacuum in the Mumbai market. It can easily sustain another mass circulation morning daily.

A well-known face in Indian journalism, Vir Sanghvi was all of 22 when he became the founder-editor of Bombay magazine. In 1983, he joined Imprint, before becoming the editor of what was then the country’s largest selling magazine, Sunday. Following a distinguished 12-year stint at Sunday, Sanghvi was appointed consulting editor for the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group in 1997. Two years on, he joined the Hindustan Times as editor, and has since been with the group. Currently editorial director at Hindustan Times, Sanghvi has the challenging task of launching the Mumbai edition of the Hindustan Times and locking horns with The Times of India in its backyard. Prajjal Saha of agencyfaqs! catches up with the Oxford-educated journalist, probing him on the publication’s plans for the Mumbai launch of the Hindustan Times...

Edited Excerpts

We will be in Mumbai next year. Our plans are well advanced, and orders have been placed for the necessary equipment. As for the exact date of launch, commercial considerations require that we do not disclose it at this stage.

We had never targeted 2003 as a launch date for the Mumbai edition. I’m not even aware that there were reports to this effect. But then this is a media business, so rumours are part of the game. As for the launch, it is going ahead exactly as we had planned.

It would be silly to reveal all our strategies so many months before the launch, so I’m not going to answer that question in detail.

Nevertheless, certain facts seem irrefutable.

One: there is a vacuum in the Mumbai market. It can easily sustain another mass circulation morning daily. So we are not overly worried about market conditions.

Two: there is much to learn from The Times of India in terms of marketing, ad sales and branding, but in editorial terms, there’s no doubt that The Times is a newspaper only in the sense that an Archie comic is literature.

I believe that readers in India’s most prosperous, cosmopolitan and modern city – and the city I grew up in – are tired of being taken for granted and treated like morons. All we need to do is to give them a quality newspaper.

I’m not going to answer that for all of the commercial reasons mentioned before.

Every city has its own dynamics and all newspaper readers are different. This is something that everyone recognizes. For instance, The Times of India’s Bombay edition was, for many years, its most conservative, while the Bangalore edition was flashier, and the Delhi edition appealed to children.

At the Hindustan Times, we’ve also allowed for regional variations. Our Chandigarh edition, the number one paper in that city, is very different from the Delhi paper. And the Calcutta edition is completely different from both of them.

So, obviously, the Bombay HT will reflect the character of its own city and will be very different from the Delhi HT. As to how it will be different, well, give me a break! I’m hardly likely to start spilling the beans at this early stage.

The Delhi edition undergoes change on pretty much a regular basis. Even before I joined, an English designer from The Independent had redesigned the paper. Then, in my time, we got Michael Keagan of The Washington Post to revamp it. The current editor, Shekhar Bhatia, has got Michael to update his design to accord with Shekhar’s view of the paper.

Our philosophy is that a newspaper must provide change with continuity. It must be recognizably the same paper every morning. But it can’t remain static; it must move with the times and change with the world around it.

The answer to the first question is easy. We don’t have a commuter culture like Bombay’s in any other Indian city. That’s why afternoon papers have been less successful in Calcutta and Delhi.

I don’t think after noon and evening papers make much difference to the edit content of morning papers. The factor that most influences news decisions in morning papers is television.

When you target as broad an age spectrum as The Times of India or the HT does, it often becomes difficult to cater adequately to all age groups in one publication.

While the youth is a key segment in the Delhi market, we were unwilling to compromise on the basic editorial excellence of the HT by dumbing down. Far better, we thought, to give young people a paper of their own, which drew on the HT’s resources and strengths, but which spoke the language of the age group.

I think newspaper reading patterns have changed enormously with the arrival of new media. And I think they will change even more during this decade. As to how they’ve changed – and will continue to do so – I’ll probably need 5000 words at least to answer that!

We have examined other media from time to time and the options are still open. But, to set the record straight, you don’t need to own say, an FM channel or a TV network, to get on-air promotion for your print products. You can do it through barter or tie-ups.

Our target is to be a strong number two in the early years, and then, when we’ve stabilized, give the city of Bombay a number one paper it can be proud of.