Hindustan Times has announced the launch of it’s business newspaper, called Mint. The word doing the rounds is that ‘Mint’ stands for Money, Information, News and Technology. The paper will hit the stands on 1st of Feb. The initial marketing has been via a referral campaign, and I subscribed around a month ago, for Rs.299 for the year. In the mail, today, I received a little booklet from HT called the ‘Initial Public Offer’. It has coupons to be handed to newspapers vendors. The business paper website will be at livemint.com, currently cloaked. Apparently mint.in, mint.co.in and htbiz.com were taken. More when we get more info.
Update:
From sources present at the launch: Apparently, the name Mint was chosen because they didn’t want to keep a standard name for a paper like Business, Times or Journal. In fact, the first name that they considered was ‘Orange’. HT’s Mint is a 24 pager, priced at Rs.2. The weekend edition is a 12 pager called Mint B, and with a supplement magazine called Lounge. They’re also planning to encourage users to vote online for stories that they want deeper analysis on. Page 2, called QuickScan, lists all the stories in the paper with a short summary.
- IBNlive has a video here.