Mint Update: Editorial Departures; Two New Editions Planned; Campaign To Be Discontinued

Mint FP

HT Media’s business daily Mint has seen the departure of two senior editors this month. National corporate editors Josey Puliyenthuruthel John and Archna Shukla have left the paper. While John, who quit today, has been part of the team that launched Mint in February 2007, Shukla, who left the paper earlier this month, had joined the paper quite early on in its life. Both were members of the paper’s editorial leadership team. John handled the daily’s coverage of beats such as telecom, aviation, auto, real estate, venture capital and private equity. Shukla handled media, marketing, FMCG and retail, and also edited the paper’s weekly marketing and management supplement Campaign. Shukla is joining The Indian Express.

Durga Raghunath, managing editor of the paper’s online edition Livemint.com, had quit late last month.

Mint is also discontinuing Campaign. Editor R. Sukumar told contentSutra that the decision has been in the works for a while and it is driven more by cost considerations (expensive newsprint) and a broader strategy to keep as much content as possible in the main paper. “If anything, I think we will see more marketing, management and strategy stories during the course of a week in Mint than less of them. We are also not going to discontinue many of the interesting columns we run in Campaign,” he said.

Sukumar also said that the paper is expanding editorial staffing across the board and is in talks with “several potential senior-level hires”.

During a post-result conference call today, HT Media CEO Rajiv Verma said the company will launch two more editions of Mint after recently launching the Berliner in Chennai and Kolkata. He did not say which cities were on the drawing board. The management also said Mint circulation, which was 1.1 lakhs before the editions in Chennai and Kolkata were launched, was now 1.25 lakhs. The management clarified that while both centres would eventually have a circulation of 10,000 copies each, right now it was being kept below this due to high newsprint costs and inclement advertising weather.

Mint‘s losses will halve this fiscal compared with the previous one, the management said, without giving the breakup of financials for individual publications. Verma also said that the company’s initial investment in Mint (Mumbai and Delhi editions) will start making money for the company by the fourth quarter of this fiscal.

HT.Media yesterday posted better-than-expected Q1 results.

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