Never do the wrong thing for the right reason: Shekhar Gupta, ThePrint

The founder and editor-in-chief of the digital news platform shares a major learning he picked up during this forty-year-long career.

Shekhar Gupta likens a media organisation’s editorial team to a church and its sales and marketing team to the state.

He believes a wall should stand between the two, but “over the years, it has become tough to keep a wall between the church and the state. India’s leading news organisations have deliberately decided to demolish the wall and done so, successfully.”

The founder and editor-in-chief of ThePrint, a digital news platform, spoke at the recently concluded fourth edition of Digipub World, an afaqs! event dedicated to online publishers, and the Digipub Awards.

Gupta was awarded the afaqs! Digipub Business Leader of the Year, and spoke about the lessons he’d learnt over his four-decade career.

Before ThePrint, he served as editor-in-chief of The Indian Express for 19 years and simultaneously held the position of the company's chief executive for 13 years. He also enjoyed a long stint at the India Today Group.

He, accepting the award “from the side of barbarians” (a monkier for the management side of a media org) stressed a particular learning: never do the wrong thing for the right reason.

Gupta shared an incident from his Indian Express days when he was told the media house’s Marathi-language daily Loksatta had been offered a six-crore rupee deal. It was fantastic but he refused to approve it and asked the team to let it go because it was from the Congress party.

“They are saying we will give you six crore rupees but you run so many interviews with our candidates in the municipal elections coming up in Maharashtra… I said just say no, don't do the wrong thing for the right reason.”

The person who informed Gupta about the deal told him it was a million dollars to which the CEO and editor-in-chief replied, “It's the best million dollars you lost.”

“Six months later, columnist P Sainath wrote a series in The Hindu on how newspapers were taking money from political parties to run interviews that pretend to be interviews but they were not… said the only Marathi paper to not have done it is the Loksatta of the Indian Express Group.”

And while he made sure to not let his organisation do the wrong thing for the right reason, Gupta, at the India Today Group learnt the nuts and bolts of running a media organisation before helming the reins of The Indian Express Group.

The first lesson he learnt was: “You cannot run a news media business, even now if you're in the print business until you understand the price of newsprint.”

All of the print media business is held hostage by the commodity pricing cycle. Oil goes up, newsprint goes up, he explains.

Gupta reminisces about a particular issue where the cost was higher than the revenue and Aroon Purie sent him a yellow sticker that said that said you should look at the prices on the menu before ordering a meal at a restaurant especially if the restaurant happens to be located in Haryana which was a reference to the press (Thompson Press in Faridabad).

Purie is the founder-publisher and editor-in-chief of India Today, and former chief executive of the India Today Group.

Gupta was part of the India Today Group during the 80s and at the time afaqs! co-founder Sreekant Khandekar headed the news desk at the organisation.