The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Hindustan Times marks 100 years of quality journalism

Most people who went to the party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Hindustan Times, last weekend at HT House in central Delhi, marvelled at how the paper had managed to stay alive for a century. Much of this is due to the unfailing support of the Birla family. GD Birla put money into the paper at the request or Mahatma Gandhi to support the freedom struggle and his family carried on the tradition long after India won its freedom. For much of its life the Hindustan Times never made much money, but the Birlas kept it going because they believed that a newspaper was a sacred trust. (Also read: The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: The many complexities of making realistic fiction )
Wonderful as that is, the focus of my admiration when I went to the anniversary party was slightly different. Around 25 years ago, KK Birla, GD Birla’s public-spirited son asked me to become editor of the Hindustan Times. It was a dream job at the time because the Birlas were very good employers and because I was fortunate enough to have as a boss KK Birla’s daughter, Shobhana Bhartia, who understood journalism and cared about the quality of the paper’s content as much as she cared about the balance sheet. (Sometimes, I felt she cared more about the journalism than she did about the profits.)
I enjoyed my time at the HT, first as editor and then as editorial director, so much that I always think back to that period and regard it as the golden age of journalism. And frankly, we had it easy.
News television was only just taking off and magazines were already in decline. In many ways, the resurgent newspaper industry was the only game in town. Yes, the internet had arrived and we did have an internet edition, but it was not something that troubled us greatly at the time.
In the last decade, however, nearly all of that has changed. Newspapers are an endangered species all over the world. Each day, more and more newspapers close down or declare that they are going to become web-only publications. Very few, like the New York Times manage to produce thriving internet and print editions.
To produce a good newspaper in this day and age is more challenging than it has ever been. On the journalistic side, there is the problem of competing with real-time news. These days, we know of events almost as they occur. If it isn’t Twitter, it is some other site that brings the news to us. Even television news now seems hopelessly dated. On the profitability side, newspaper managements have to live with the reality that advertising has mostly shifted to the digital economy and that papers must struggle to make money.
And yet, newspapers like the Hindustan Times continue to flourish. They still turn out quality journalism day after day. The HT’s internet platform (on which this article is appearing, for example) does very well, but the heart and soul of the newspaper are in the print edition.
It must be difficult putting a newspaper to bed every evening knowing that by the time your readers receive it the following morning, things may well have changed dramatically and that, in any case, the news in your paper may have already been widely disseminated. It is an enormous challenge for journalists to think of ways to engage with their readers who have got the basic news points already from some digital or social media source.
And yet papers like the Hindustan Times continue to keep the attention of their readers. Often, they speak for the cities where they are published. I helped launch the Mumbai edition of the Hindustan Times so I may not be entirely unbiased but when I am in Mumbai and I open my copy of the HT in the morning I feel that I have tapped into the heartbeat of the city.
Delhi has always been home for the Hindustan Times. The HT has been the newspaper that consistently speaks for the Capital, the paper that summarises and expresses the hopes and fears of its citizens. Each time I travel out and then return to Delhi and I want to feel that I am back home I only have to turn the pages of the HT for the spirit of Delhi to come alive in my hands.
How do papers like the HT manage to engage with their readers in this difficult time? Well, the editors certainly have a much more difficult job than I did when I was editing the Hindustan Times. Today’s editors need to give us the news that the internet with its emphasis on immediacy and click-counting sensationalism has missed. They need to make us feel better-informed and more able to see beyond the news itself so that we understand its implications and ramifications.
I marvel at how well the HT manages to do this every morning. It has moved with the needs of its readers and sought to fill in the blanks, colour the pictures, connect the dots, and help us make sense of the information we need to help us understand the world we live in.
I suspect that this is something that readers may not realise — and a good newspaper should meet the needs of its readers without seeming to struggle to do so — but journalists know it only too well. We know how difficult it is to produce a newspaper that is relevant to our times. And then there are harsh realities of the market. Advertising has declined, so budgets have been reduced and staff strengths are down, while readers have become even more demanding than they used to be.
The HT manages to satisfy the millions of people who still read it every day because it has changed to reflect our times. It may still look the same and its soul is untouched. But the content and style are very different from what they were 25 years ago. The people who create the paper now do so under the sorts of pressures that we never had to face.
So yes, it is a triumph for the HT to have survived and flourished for 100 years. But speaking as a journalist and one with some experience of the Hindustan Times, a great achievement has been the way in which the paper has changed over the last few years to serve the needs of its readers in a completely new world, without ever losing sight of what it means to be one of the world’s great newspapers.
So happy birthday Hindustan Times. You were born to fight for India’s freedom. And like India you have evolved and transformed, staying the same and yet becoming very different.
Here’s to the next century!