Hindustan Times and The Wall Street Journal have finally come out with their much awaited financial daily - Mint. The paper is out with a promise to bring refreshingly clarity in business.

Mint doesn’t want to carry too many news, one editorial said. The paper will instead give more of news analysis. So instead of overloading the reader with too much information, it will present the best and the most-important news. Good point. However it also believes that readers need new choices and credible alternatives.

The two philosophies seem clashing with each other a bit. I might also want to choose for myself what I want to read, not the editors of the newspaper I subscribe to. So I might want to subscribe to a paper that wouldn’t miss out on any news and give me the choice to choose what news I feel is important for me.

That said, I agree that sometimes there might be just too many news in a paper. As a reader, I hardly read half of what is printed. Maybe I might need someone credible and professional to weed out the chaff from the grain and save me time.

Mint definitely is trying to get its readers involved, adhering to the web 2.0 mantra. Readers can write in what they want to read in the next day’s edition. There is a contents page that includes small snippets of all news appearing in that edition -first time I am seeing this in an Indian newspaper. It even have indexes of companies and people featured in that particular edition.

The online version will have picture galleries, videos, and animated graphics.

Pitch to Mint
Is Mint a daily version of the business magazines, if they are going to focus more on news analysis and plain news reporting? We have many clients who can talk out all the strategies except for the financial figures. So will Mint bite to this sort of pitch? Not entirely. Most of the story headlines in many pages in today’s edition of Mint talked about rupees, percentages, Q3 results, investments, and profits. That said, the scope of pitching feature stories seems more in Mint than in other financial papers who just seem plain mad after figures.

As a new newspaper, the paper might be out to report a blockbuster news story from somewhere, just as any other new publication or TV channel does. Watch out.

Mint has currently a decent number of people, not huge like ET for now, currently in its Delhi office. They are receptive to ideas, very professional in their approach (at least the people I have interacted with), and are willing to listen lot more. One good part about Mint is that every phone extension there has a message recorder where you can leave your voice messages. Mint has been picking up journalists from many publications in the recent months. No surprise that there are journalists on different beats already such as IT, automobiles, real estates, finances, etc. in its (swanky) Delhi office. They have been out interviewing corporates as early as last December if I remember correctly.

Mint comes out from Mumbai and Delhi currently, and coming to Chandigarh and Kolkata. And if its subscription figures are to be believed, it has reached 75,000. ET currently has a circulation of 590,246 copies, HBL 1,17,047 copies, and BS 96,150 (FE ?). Should you recommend Mint to your clients as part of their media relations plan? Definitely. Not in place of the other three as yet, but this one’s might just challenge their spots too soon.