There was a time when profit was an uncomfortable word at HT Media. Shobhana Bhartia, the current chairperson and editorial director, recounts how, early in her career, she would often indulge in a small celebration to mark profits. But her father KK Birla would be perplexed at her enthusiasm. After all, his media venture wasn’t supposed to be a profit-making concern. He didn’t even think of it as a business. For him, it represented an agenda for independence at the time Hindustan Times (HT) started in 1924, and later, a mission for nation-building post independence.
Ninety years down the line, HT Media is a successful and profitable business, and the publisher of India’s second most read dailies both in Hindi and English (Hindustan and HT), as well as English business paper Mint. It has also ventured into radio, the internet business and education. And profit is no longer an uncomfortable word.
Bhartia, who grew up in Kolkata, learned about business, politics and the freedom struggle at the dinner table. As the granddaughter of the legendary Ghanshyam Das Birla, she had a ringside view to the family empire but from among the diverse businesses in her radar, her heart clearly lay in media. She would often send cuttings from HT to her father, pointing out what the articles missed out on; she would also assess what other papers were writing about and how their own publication could improve the coverage of important events. It was apparent: More than the business side, it was the editorial work that excited her.
Initially, he also didn’t quite comprehend the concept of printing colour pages. “But he took to it very fast,” she says. His reservation was that the brightness might vitiate the seriousness of the paper. “He felt it would be more like a comic book. So yes, there were generational issues, since he was very actively involved in the ’30s and the ’40s when the voice of the paper mattered a lot,” Bhartia points out, recalling the eminent freedom fighters, right from Gandhiji’s son, Devdas Gandhi, who edited HT, to others who would write in pseudonyms because the newspaper was a platform to further the goal of freedom. On the other hand, Birla was a strong proponent of technology and modernised the business according to the latest trends. He also hired professionals and adopted best practices in his fertiliser and sugar business. But the change in the newspaper business—that was tougher for him to handle.
(This story appears in the 21 March, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
But isn\'t the news media business bang in the middle of the license-permit raj, and closed to competition from international brands? A \"free market\", if at all it happens, is always the real test.
on Mar 15, 2014