The flip side of being number one is that there are no examples to follow.

The first impression one gets of him is that of a reticent, media-shy executive. That is ironical for, surely, a mediaperson must be as positively vocal as possible. But 43-year-old Sanjay Gupta, editor, ‘Dainik Jagran’, and CEO, ‘Jagran Prakashan’, believes in letting his work speak for him. And how. The honcho of India’s largest-read daily is in a league of his own – he reads each page of even the newspaper’s city supplements every day to ensure everything is going perfectly.

Gupta, who has been associated with the Jagran group for the past two decades, has been the frontrunner in the mission to make ‘Dainik Jagran’ the most widely read daily in the country.

In a candid conversation with Ananya Roy of agencyfaqs!, this soft-spoken man of few words talks about the Jagran group’s future plans and explains what it takes to stay at the number one position.

Edited Excerpts

There is no benchmark as such. You have to think, consolidate and reach the numero uno position. I agree that it is very difficult to stay there. When you are at the top, there are no examples to follow. So, one has to try and keep excelling at one’s own game. It is important to set agendas and goals. One needs to keep innovating constantly. It is difficult, not easy – one needs to be on one’s toes all the time.

Other than Uttar Pradesh, all the states are new markets for ‘Dainik Jagran’. In some of these markets, we have been operating since the last 15 years, while there are a few in which we are just a month old. And it is in these markets that we are growing at a much faster rate.

In spite of this, the per copy readership of ‘Dainik Jagran’ is lower than that of the existing players in these markets. This gives us an opportunity to convert circulation into readership.

Readership figures are all about recall value. Once that recall value is at par with the existing players, who have been there for 40 years or so, then ‘Dainik Jagran’ readership figures will also indicate a growth.

If the readership per copy of ‘Dainik Jagran’ matches that of ‘Punjab Kesari’ in Punjab, its total readership figure would just double.

We are pushing hard to fill this gap in per copy readership. Readership building is a different capability from just building circulation.

We have our own brand department. They are constantly being educated about the need to increase brand recall. They keep organising events that reflect our focus on social responsibility.

We also set up a number of reader forums, where our brand department gets to interact with the readers, and vice versa. Here, we also get an opportunity to increase the real tangible value of the newspaper brand.

It is just a perception built across the English-speaking society that it is upmarket. But the fact is that only 2.5-3 per cent of the total population in India knows how to read or write English. The remaining 97 per cent cannot be termed as comprising the lower socioeconomic group.

In the case of ‘Dainik Jagran’, SEC A contributes 35-40 per cent of our total readership. The ratio of SEC A readers might be slightly higher for the English dailies, but in absolute terms, we have a higher readership than the English dailies, even among SEC A.

The English dailies’ claims of high readership among SEC A is mainly restricted to the metros. This happens because in every city, there are a few readers who are more comfortable with the English language. However, in other cities and towns, language newspapers rule the roost. For instance, in a city such as Lucknow, even the English-speaking readers will read a Hindi daily.

But today, even the English newspapers are looking forward to mass numbers, selling at a lower price to allure more bilingual readers. This is where the ‘raddi economics’ comes in. These readers may be comfortable in Hindi, but the lure of a cheap newspaper with more pages, and hence more ‘raddi’ value, is more. One can actually recover the major cost incurred to buy these newspapers by selling it as scrap at the end of the month.

I would say that the English press gets more corporate advertising, but not consumer advertising. It doesn’t make sense for a premium brand such as Mercedes Benz, which has a market only in the metros, to advertise in language newspapers. Despite this, we also get a Mercedes Benz ad once in a while.

Having said that, these brands will not advertise in general English dailies either as they are also mass-based newspapers like us. These advertisers put their money mainly into business dailies or magazines.

It is the comfort zone of an individual. If he has been born and brought up in an English-centric home, for instance, if the reader is a doctor or lawyer or an IAS officer, he’ll choose an English paper. See, the law of governance in India is by and large English. So, he’s dealing in English day in and day out and shares a comfort level with the language.

But the English dailies miss out on the local flavour. The overall psyche of a person still relates to Hindi or some other Indian language. At the end of the day, we are ‘Bharatiya’ and not ‘Indians’.

In terms of pure content, an English newspaper will be better than a language product in the metros. Due to paucity of resources, we, the language players, cannot put so much into the metros because we know that the advertising returns there are less. ‘Dainik Jagran’ today is the only dominating Hindi player in a metro such as Delhi. ‘Dainik Bhaskar’ and ‘Amar Ujala’ have started recently. They are just two years old.

Radio will only complement print. Each medium complements the other. It just fuels the necessity of marketing. If there are 1,000 retailers in a town, not all of them will advertise on radio. We have a long way to go if we are to compare ourselves with a developed economy. The Indian market is so huge, you can’t even imagine the size. We have not exploited even 10-15 per cent of this market. Radio isn’t a threat even in developed economies, so why should it be a threat here? When TV came in, everyone thought it would be a threat to newspapers. This year, newspapers grew faster than TV. There is multiple media choice.

See, reading a newspaper is by appointment. Listening to the radio or watching television is more casual. In print, the whole concentration of the reader is on the newspaper as he reads it.

Even in the markets where radio is present now, they haven’t had any impact on print.

How continuously? Radio is not an ad channel. They have to put in their programming. The radio jockey has to put in some words there. The choice is with the listener, he can flip the channel. Like TV, even in FM, the remote control is in the listener’s hand. The moment an ad comes, he flips channels. Yes, purely entertainment radio channels do get advertising, and will be able to rake in cash.

But it’s a huge market and there is space for everyone. Advertisers are becoming savvy enough to realise how much potential a newspaper has, what kind of advertising spends to put in print, TV, radio or even in SMS.

And the Jagran group, today, is present not in just one domain. We are there on television and also on the web. But even when, in the dotcom era, everyone predicted print would just vanish, look at what happened. No one will open his laptop at eight in the morning, connect and then wait for the info to download. That takes time. Whereas a newspaper can be taken anywhere and read everywhere.

There were no travel supplements in the Hindi newspaper genre. We are trying to create a space there. And ‘Yatra’ is not completely a high-class lifestyle product.

We are already successful. See, we should not equate travel with only the premium, five-star culture. In India, general tourism and pilgrimage tourism are probably 100 times bigger than five-star tourism.

There are a growing number of budget tourists in the country who also make international trips. And these budget tourists contribute to the readership of ‘Yatra’.

When people wrote travelogues 500 years ago, they did not target any specific group. Travel reading is also leisure reading. If I read about new destinations, I feel happy. There are many English travel magazines, but there aren’t any in Hindi.

‘Junior Jagran’ basically targets school-going kids aged 13-18 years. While there are children from public schools who are comfortable with English, there are also kids from Hindi-medium schools. We need to reach out to both these segments.

As of now, we are not trying to focus so much on advertising. Anyway, supplement advertising in India or the world over is very little. I was talking to a few international publishers and they agree that advertisers shy away from supplement advertising.

No publisher can answer this question. It is in the mindset of the client. As far as advertising in the supplements that you have mentioned is concerned, it’s mainly local advertising.

We’ll be looking into it. It’s a recently launched product. We are yet to pitch for national clients. In fact, we are not looking for local advertising as it might spoil the layout.

Yes, we are looking at it, but it is too premature to comment on this. All I can say is that we will provide the content the market wants. And the overall idea is to build by marketing only on the basis of content. We have a strong print base, and we will leverage it even in our radio business.

Yes, we do need a business newspaper in Hindi. You are right, what we carry in the business section of ‘Dainik Jagran’ might not be sufficient, but as of now, due to paucity of resources, we are not looking at launching a business daily.