Shobhana Bhartia -The Media Power

Shobhana Bhartia, Vice Chairperson, The Hindustan Times Limited (HT), it seems, never forecloses any options. "We may possibly look at the television business, not in the immediate future, but more on a five-year horizon." Well, this---after a failed attempt at television, Home TV, in the 1990s.
And equally, never jumps into anything without adequate preparation. "The infrastructure is taking time. We'll launch next year," she adds, on the company's eponymous paper's much-awaited launch in Mumbai, the country's biggest newspaper advertising market and bastion of its fierce competitor for daily morning readership, The Times of India (TOI).
The Birla lady joined the family business in 1986, and has been something of an iconoclast, transforming an old tardy organisation in a sector that never thought itself as an industry, into something markedly more innovative, dynamic and attention-getting. Today, she leads a vibrant ten-edition strong newspaper that has already proved all its sceptics wrong in Delhi, and could possibly give the country's most famous media monopoly (TOI in Mumbai) a serious case of jitters.
Even bolder, perhaps, has been Bhartia's inking of the first FDI deal in Indian news print media; she sold a 20-per cent stake in Hindustan Times Media to Henderson Global Investors. This was done after the Government of India changed its FDI-in-print-media policy last year.
Then, there have been signs of aggression on other fronts---as when Bhartia took on the findings of the National Readership Survey (NRS). "The reason we challenged the NRS findings was not because there was a minor difference, not because the Times of India came ahead of us, but because those figures were ridiculous," she says.
And all this while keeping a close eye on consolidating HT, even springing quite a few never-before newspaper innovations in the country in the 2-Minute HT, Brunch weekend reading, HT Sports as a four-page pullout, and HT Premiere. "This kind of product (Brunch) has to catch on. Though we got a great reader response, the advertisers still haven't found a slot for a magazine that comes with a newspaper."
Amongst all this, Bhartia manages to find time to catch up with her reading, especially in areas of interest such as international affairs and foreign policy. She is currently "struggling through" Bill Clinton's 900-page autobiographical tome, and has just finished reading a book by Robert Kagan.
Tempted to ask how she manages work-life balance? "I enjoy my work terribly, so in a sense I don't feel I am working (at all). Or that this is work and this is pleasure, because my heart is very much in my work. It is very much the quality of time you spend with the family."