BackWelcome to Mint on Sunday
So far, readers have had almost nothing to read on Sundays. Hopefully, Mint's new offering will change that.
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This essay—there will be one every week in this Sunday special—would be about advertising, I had told myself. After all, advertising was my first love and I almost ended up in it before diving into journalism because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and chance and (warning: shameless pat on back coming) superior quizzing abilities provided an opportunity to do so. But that story can wait.
So, it turns out, can the bit about advertising.
Let’s talk about this offering, Mint on Sunday, first.
When we were thinking about Mint in 2006, we decided it would be a six-day newspaper, with the features magazine becoming the main paper (and the main paper becoming an insert) on the sixth day.
No one, we reasoned (and research confirmed), would be interested in a business newspaper on Sundays.
Over the years, we went from print-largely to web-first, but we still didn’t go near Sundays.
Which, in hindsight, was doing readers, and not just of Mint, a disservice—because there is almost nothing to read on Sundays.
A few months ago, we decided to launch a Sunday offering.
Mint on Sunday harks back to the days when Sunday papers were filled with long reads and interesting columns, but with a twist. It is completely digital, a section on our website that can also be seen in isolation on phones and tablets (without seeing the rest of Mint). And the storytelling, at least in some of the stories, is immersive, offering a mix of text and pictures and videos and data.
For the cover story of the first issue—it’s on India’s Mad Men, a doff of the hat to the last season of the popular American TV show—I tapped two old friends, the Seth brothers, who were part of India’s happening ad scene in the late 1980s and 1990s, to write about how it was in those days. Mint’s media and marketing editor Shuchi Bansal convinced Kiran Khalap to curate a selection of his favourite ads of the 1980s. The result is just what I expected it to be—a good Sunday read.
Over the weeks, you will realize that there are some regular sections in this weekly offering—such as the week’s most important news captured through data, a business quiz, and Mint’s popular Economics Express and Life Hacks columns (both of which belong on a Sunday).
All told, it will take you 35-40 minutes to go through the nine stories that make up this Sunday magazine.
Happy reading.
R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.
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