Building a relationship with your readers

Sanja Gupta, editor & CEO, Dainik Jagran, India, said that as the newspaper with the world's largest readership, the Hindi-language Jagran faces formidable logistical problems:

• It has a network of 29 editions, 204 sub-editions daily, spread across 10 states and more than 250 districts.
• The dialect of conversation in India changes almost every 25 kilometers, so the editorial team must adapt each of the sub-editions to reflect the colloquial taste of every distinct market.

There is no doubt that the Indian media market is complex. But Gupta says the secret to the Jagran's success is to keep things simple.

"The building blocks of success were very clearly built on the basic premise of doing the simple things well," he says. "The vision was very clear to create a newspaper to reflect the free voice of the people, and our guiding philosophy in action was a build a relationship with readers. All our initiatives have stemmed from building a relationship with our readers. All of our future initiatives will also be built around this guiding philosophy."

Despite its size, Jagran still has room to grow - its reader base is estimated at 48 million readers.

For more on the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) congress held in Moscow this year or the World Editor's Forum, go to www.moscow2006.com and www.editorsweblog.org.