News Express strengthens sales team

The high definition national Hindi general news channel has presence across the country.

News Express, a Hindi general news channel, has recently taken aboard Amit Tripathi as national sales head. Tripathi's previous assignment was with P7, another Hindi news channel. Along with Tripathi, the channel has appointed three more officials in its sales team and looks forward to appoint two more.

Hiren Mehta has been given the mandate to handle the sales duties of Maharashtra and Gujarat markets as regional head, west, sales. In addition, Jatinder Nair will take care of sales as assistant general manager, sales, while Chakeet Nirman has been appointed as assistant manager, sales.

Nair and Nirman will report to Mehta, who in turn will report to Tripathi. Tripathi will report to Nishant Chaturvedi, channel head, News Express. Mehta has about 12 years of experience in ad sales.

Tripathi started his career with Lashkara, a Punjabi channel, in 1998. Later, he worked at Sahara Samay, News 24, Voice of India and CNEB. He has also worked with Radio City for some time.

Tripathi suggests that at News Express, the team will work towards a specific strategy. "Delhi has a good retail market. However, Mumbai is more corporate set-up. Hence, the channel will look forward to corporate tie ups in Mumbai, which will promote and offer innovations and integrations, both on-ground and on-air. The Delhi market will have both retail tie ups and similar corporate partnerships."

He agrees that barring the top four-five players in the genre, selling is not very easy.

Mehta mentions that there is a lot of effort to pull the channel up amongst the top five.

The channel, which was launched in July 2011, expects to break even by the end of 2015. It is the only news channel which is available in high definition.

Apart from News Express, the Sai Prasad Group also owns a weekly newspaper, Humvatan.