Steering a family owned Indian newspaper

Steering a family owned Indian newspaper

N Murali of The Hindu interviewed on family owned media, journalistic values, commercial interests, the competition, price wars, and the entry of foreign media.

He is the proverbial mystery man in media. And he reflects the strong and silent demeanour so typical of The Hindu Group. Not known to many people, 55-year old N. Murali, joint managing director, is a chartered accountant by profession and has kept the statistics of the group in shape since 1969. Not bad, considering the group is not too high on hype. In this rare interview to Shamni Pande of agencyfaqs!, Murali lashes out against the entry of foreign media and explains why The Hindu Group does what it does best, and how the orthodox tag has not really stood in the way of either its business or circulation growth.

Q. You have been with The Hindu Group for over 30 years now and you¿ve virtually built your career here. Tell us how you got into the family business?

A. I am a chartered accountant by profession. Having graduated from Loyola College, Chennai, in Commerce, I joined the group in end 1969. I learnt the ropes here and specialised in newspaper management. I look after the business aspect of the paper. This is a family-owned enterprise and an interesting co-incidence in India is that most successful newspapers, whether language or English, have been family-owned.

I am not trying to say that family-owned businesses are superior to professionally-managed entities, but historically it has happened this way. And we feel the family members - whether in journalism or in management - should be professionally qualified to handle such operations. Even among family members you have to allocate responsibilities carefully. In fact, as we were growing up we always knew we would come into the family concern one day. Apart from The Hindu, I also handle other group publications - Frontline, The Sportstar and Business Line.

Q. Please take me down memory lane and tell me about the turning points for the organisation.

A. The Hindu has always used technology to leverage its strong journalistic values. The Hindu started off by having ¿dak editions¿ or the so-called evening editions, but once you grow, there is a need to reach out to a multiplicity of centres. Till 1963 we used to send the copies by train; thereafter we started using India Airlines to fly our editions early in the morning to the major cities in the south. We started using our own aircraft 1964 onwards. In 1969 we started our facsimile edition and have not looked back since we started our printing centre in Coimbatore (pages were made in Chennai and transmitted electronically through leased lines). Starting 1970 we went about launching a series of new editions - from Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madurai to the Vijaywada edition (the 10th) in December last year.

Our decision to invest in new printing centres and upgrade to the latest technology has helped us grow our circulation and move away from being a Chennai-centric paper. It has helped us increase ad revenue by catering to regional news requirements and reaching people in different parts of the country.

The group restarted The Sportstar in 1979 in its new avatar. It was earlier called Sports and Passtime, which we ran till the 1950s, but then we had to close it down in 1968 due to labour problems. In 1984 we launched the fortnightly magazine Frontline. In 1994, we started Business Line (BL). At that time The Economic Times (ET) was the big competitor and they started a price war. We realised in the post-liberalisation era interest in business and economy news was on the rise. This decision has paid off and BL is growing steadily. Meanwhile, The Times of India (TOI) unleashed a price war in Bangalore - much like the one in Delhi - in