Inside the Mint newsroom: What it takes to bring out our budget special edition

In The Beat Report, Mint's journalists bring you unique perspectives on their beats, breaking down new trends and developments, and sharing behind-the-scenes stories from their reporting. This week’s report is by Tanay Sukumar, our data editor, who shares secrets of how a newsroom gets together to produce a striking Budget edition.

The year was news-heavy, with big stories turning up at alarming (but no less thrilling) frequency, often at odd hours. Among them: shock tariffs from the US, Operation Sindoor, and a late-night overhaul of the goods and service tax. One of our editors even jumped up from her hotel bed (voluntarily) to shoot a video explaining the new labour codes while she was on vacation.

But as any seasoned journalist will tell you, nothing beats the Budget day.

Last Sunday marked my 12th Budget in this profession. Editors, reporters, and designers, even those with no less than 20 years of experience, prefer to start preparing weeks, sometimes months, in advance. The stakes are high: Mint’s Budget edition is highly respected and we have the burden of beating our own standards year after year. Our readers also turn to our digital platforms to make sense of what’s happening on a noisy day like this, in real time. It’d only be mildly hyperbolic if I said that financial newspapers’ Budget editions face no less scrutiny than the Budget itself!

This time, our editor-in-chief called our first Budget meeting on 31 October 2025. Several questions that were raised were met with: “We’ll know this only on Budget day”, or “We’ll play it by the ear”—before the person who gave this answer would raise an equally farcical question. But that doesn’t make this meeting fruitless; the purpose was just to get the ball rolling. In a lean newsroom like Mint, daily workflows typically make it difficult to plan for something even two days in advance. So, starting that early, in whatever measure, helps.

By the end of this sleepy 3pm meeting, tasks were duly assigned and an early plan laid out.

The early head start

Two teams had their tasks immediately cut out: our policy bureau and the design team. The pride of a journalist’s career rests on well-placed sources privy to critical information. Mint has a reliable crystal ball when it comes to predicting parts of the Budget (and then some) thanks to our policy news hounds, often found in the ministry offices of central Delhi.

Their first task: Sense the drift in the finance ministry and the line ministries to get the right leads. That initial reporting, which doesn’t end up as stories in the paper, helps us think of a “Budget theme”, which we use for both our editorial and marketing campaigns in the run-up. These inputs helped us decide on the theme as “Reform Runway”. (Do we get bragging rights for predicting the “Reform Express” reference in the actual speech? You decide.!) Starting late November, our reporters published one story every day (and multiple stories on some days) about what the Budget would entail. Nearly all turned out to be true.

Meanwhile, the design team likes to start with a blank canvas each year. A Budget edition can have dozens of stories, charts, columns and analyses, but its grandeur must match its once-in-a-year character. Illustrations are commissioned early; multiple design options for page 1 are put together, rejected, redone, and finalized. Lessons from previous years are taken. The task is tough: to uphold Mint’s elegant design character on a big news day overflowing with emotion, to give readers a sense of calm amid the noise.

The long preparation peaks in January, as more characters enter the stage. From running Budget polls and quizzes and writing historical Budget trivia for our digital readers to preparing elusive expert columnists and analysts to help us out with the right insights on 1 February—it’s a humongous team effort. Few care for credit; the mood is simply to make it happen, with whichever tiny cog of the wheel we are tasked with steering.

Senior editors familiarize new, junior colleagues with the nuts and bolts, so that they can keep their cool in the drama that’s set to unfold. Newbies can be excited, but nervous, too. They are trained to look at past Budget documents to be ready for how to find and figure out things quickly—and interpret new announcements accurately in historical context—all while being engaged in their daily reporting drill.

The D-Day comes

On the final day of the marathon, we start trickling into the office by 9am, running live blogs, managing homepages, getting the final prep in place, setting up the ambience—and just comforting each other with smiles and sandwiches. The editor-in-chief is everywhere all at once, calming the nerves and dropping in the odd joke that eases the performance pressure. He then asks you two questions to test your preparedness, and being able to give all the right answers can make your day. The wrong answer won’t be met with a jibe, but perhaps, a second joke.

The Budget speech starts at 11am. Television screens blare in different parts of the newsroom as journalists frantically take notes. Some of us whose brains stop working in crowds plug earphones in, only looking at each other with smiles when the finance minister makes a light remark or reads out a poem—or makes not-so-secret gestures to woo poll-bound states. As the speech stretches past the 60-minute mark, some of us begin to amble around our computers, exchanging weary glances with each other.

The only moment the newsroom seems fully relaxed in the whole day is the minute after the speech ends. We walk back calmly to our seats, knowing that once we start with work for the day, there won’t be an end till midnight. That one minute is worth relishing. (Except the data journalist walking to the designer who will update a pre-designed chart with the length of the finance minister’s latest speech, for a graphic that will be quickly published on social media.)

All of us then start getting to work, so that we can have our story ideas ready for the 2pm meeting the editor-in-chief has called. Someone remarks that the government gets months to prepare the Budget, but the newsmen have a few tight hours to figure it out right. (Don’t forget, many would have published stories online already by now, during the speech itself.) The meeting decides something as broad as figuring out our aggregate view of the Budget, to as minute as the placement of various stories and graphics on each page. As the meeting goes on, team leads take turns to exit the room midway as soon as their task for the day is clear.

Lunch packets come to your desk, and someone springs the customary remark that veg biryani is just pulao— the clichés add up to help carry the day for a harried journalist. Stories are written, vetted, edited and published, all through the day. Calls are made to experts to understand the implications of the announcements. Designers pick the final illustrations out of the many pairs they have on standby. The desk begins to implement the layout plan for the day on our pagemaking software, with one part of their brain starting to think of options for the magic all-caps headline that will splash our page 1 the next day.

Our personal finance team gets to explaining what it means for the common investor, through multiple stories, carefully interpreted, explained and presented. All our beat reporters—auto, jobs, education, industry, tech, and so on—do the same, picking up what it means for their specific, micro areas: Each niche story adds up to build a comprehensive, omnibus edition. Our data team plays the usual spoilsport, finding ways to critique the Budget through the less-talked-about numbers. Our partners at howindialives.com put together our trademark, popular middle two-pager (called the centrespread), showing how the Budget’s money comes in and where it goes out.

Two top editors sit at 8pm to deliberate on the final headlines for each and every page: classy, simple, clever. The exercise takes several hours, as various editors queue up to annoy them over the headlines they were giving to the stories their teams wrote (at least I did!). Dinner is served on our desks (our wonderful admin team carefully picks easy-to-eat items so that we can work while eating; we have rolls in the evening) as we type away with the deadline nearing.

By 9pm, the bosses start asking their team members to leave for home: they have to turn up the next day with even more stories. Many don’t listen; some walk to others to help them out, and some chat away until a final rebuke sends them packing.

It’s past midnight now, and finally we close our page 1 with the headline ‘Solid State Drive’—a careful multi-layered pun, summing up the Budget’s sentiment and key themes. Hidden behind the headlines and pictures that go around on social media is an effort that, as you know by now, spans months—and teams, each delivering on its own job with precision. One error with a fact, interpretation, or even how we spelt a word, and it can undo the day. But we wake with pride, relief and steaming coffee, having put our best foot forward on the biggest day of the year, and ready for more.

Catch our Budget edition in its e-paper version here. Do consider subscribing to Mint Premium to be able to access the daily e-paper, and a lot more. My coupon code TANA30 can get you a 30% discount on our one- or two-year plans (applicable only for Mint or Mint+WSJ subscriptions).

Edited by James Mathew.