"I ask for my morning paper, the younger generation asks for alerts": Akila Urankar, Business Standard

Business Standard is about to complete 40 years, 23 of which were as part of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika Group. It was sold, in 1997, to its current management. Since then, the paper has been operating as a standalone.

Business Standard grew from a single-edition (Kolkata), English language one to a multi-edition and multi-language paper. Its English edition is published from 12 cities while the Hindi edition is published from eight.

To commemorate the occasion, the paper will be conducting a series of editorial and other marketing activities. afaqs! quizzed Akila Urankar, president, Business Standard, to find out more. Excerpts:

Edited Excerpts

I do not think it has changed in terms of shaping and understanding opinions, identifying the market and economy trends and other business aspects.

What has changed is the way in which the consumption of news is happening. There is a very small set of people who are interested in the detailed analysis. Everything has become superficial and superfluous. Most talk in one-liners - 'Sensex fallen by this many points', 'New Finance Policy'. People are not interested in the why, how and impact of something that has happened.

I ask for my morning paper, but the younger generation is happy to get their alerts and read it. A newspaper tells you what you should read, while on the web, a consumer decides what newspaper she should read. The average number of minutes that a reader spends on a newspaper has gone down for many, but not for Business Standard. The average consumer is still spending 20-23 minutes with the Business Standard.

Our readers are relatively senior guys who are decision makers. For them, this kind of information is important because it gives expert analysis. It could be the owner of an SME or a finance head, private equity or hedge fund personnel. These are people who have either the money to play with or their customers' money to work with. It might not be the retail stock investor who looks at the stock markets from that perspective.

If you look at the country itself, lifestyle, education, consumption pattern and everything has undergone a change in the times. So have our readers.

As part of a larger group, one is able to leverage a lot of scale that the group already has. Within a group, there are benefits of circulation and distribution - and the costs are spread across many more products. The only advantage with one product is that all our energies are directed towards it and comes out as much sharper. It helps us deliver a good and a refined product.

We are very clear that we wish to be in the business genre, and whatever we can do in the business information space, we will continue to do so be it on the online side or the newspaper side.

We have done intensive research that has shown us the imagery of our readers and the imagery he has for the brand. We then ask what inputs our reader would like to have. We keep the reader in mind and then build our product around it.

Twenty years ago, the paper had hardcore news. After TN Ninan took over, a softer element started coming in. He introduced sections on art and cars. The latter is a great example as a majority of our readers were males, interested in cars and were reading more about that. Those initiatives have built a strong loyalty.

Now the reader likes to read a variety of topics such as technology, gadgets, news, films, fashion and others. We cover all. We don't report that Shah Rukh Khan has launched a new film, but we cover the business aspects of it and analyse it. We talk of sports, IPL, cricket and others but from the business side of it.

The reader is evolving and we are covering more and more of subjects he is interested in. We cover young entrepreneurs who have set up small shops and are doing well or interact with students to help them understand business better. We run a lot of campus initiatives.

This is a combined issue for the entire news genre. Circulation is falling - regional papers are growing, but English is not. We have to invest more and more in our digital space. The two will co-exist. Nothing dies.

Either of the two will definitely lose but will it be completely shut? I do not think so.

Hindi was fine but Gujarati was not. Though the numbers are small for the Hindi, the product is for the captive strong SME readership base in the region. It is not the working professional. There is not much market for the other language business papers. People in those markets who are our audience are proficient in English, so they would prefer to read that paper.

English may not be the language of business in many regions. But what we have seen is that wherever we have launched, English is equally big. For example, in Lucknow, we have our paper both in English and Hindi and the numbers are fine. Also now when you do an event on ground, the language is not just Hindi or English but a mix of both.

We are there in most of the towns and cities that matter.