The Daily News Analysis (DNA) is fighting for its share of the action. Since the paper’s launch in Mumbai in 2005 it has become India’s sixth most popular English language daily and has expanded to five other major Indian cities. In a fiercely competitive environment it seeks to capture readers by marketing itself as young, dynamic and hyperlocal.

WAN-IFRA spoke to both to editor in chief Aditya Sinha and editor of the Ahmedabad edition Shyam Parekh about the DNA’s approach. Parekh spoke at the 18th World Editors Forum in Vienna about innovations in print. You can find a link to his presentation here.

WAN-IFRA: The DNA has undergone a huge expansion since in was launched in 2005. What gap in the market did it fill?

SINHA: Demographically India is a very young country so the DNA consciously set out to address its younger readers. When we launched we tried variety with our approach to news, to graphics, and with our use of colours to make it very younger-reader friendly.

WAN-IFRA How else do you make your paper appealing to young readers?

SINHA: It’s not just form but also content. We give a lot of importance to our sports package and to things to do with technology and lifestyle because that appeals to younger readers.

But the other thing of course is our approach. Younger people are a little more questioning, they’re maybe more rebellious. I’ve worked in other newsrooms, including those of our rivals during my career and the whole news process from reporting to production is very static, very traditional and very rigid. Whereas in our paper we try to be a little more questioning and we try a lot of new things.

WAN-IFRA: Which three print innovations at the DNA have proved most popular with readers?

SINHA: We did away with the edit page. We didn’t have this ghetto where the paper broadly pronounced upon issues. We carry a lot of analysis in the paper, but we have it spread out all over the paper. That’s one thing we’ve done that’s broken from the paradigm.

We put a lot of effort into our headlines. That may not sound like a lot but it makes a big difference. Sometimes straight headlines have their use but we put a lot of effort into them and try to come up with something a little smarter without being complex. Then people talk about it the next day and it attracts people at stores.

We do a lot of investigative stories. In India a lot of papers are owned by big business and they don’t do investigative stories because it comes in conflict with their business interests. We’ve been supportive of hard-hitting stories without worrying about having a business fall out. We give the impression of being an aggressive, young paper.

WAN-IFRA: Mr. Parekh, you oversaw the launch of DNA Ahmedabad in 2007 – the first expansion of the full paper outside Mumbai. What factors did you take into account to make it work?

PAREKH: We went hyperlocal vis-à-vis The Times of India, our competitor, which is one of the oldest newspapers in India. They had been established in Ahmedabad for over 35 years and we had to taken them on. So we presented ourselves as a youthful, locally based paper and our approach was not telling the readers or advising them. Instead of imposing what we considered important, we figured out what would be important for them.

The Times of India was not as local as we were and it was never a youthful paper. Their approach was very serious. So we tried to make it easy for people to read. Our headings were very simple: they have to let the reader know what’s there in the story. We introduced intros to support the headings, and on top of that we carried the whole story in a box, in bulleted points. So if you don’t have time and you want to quickly browse through you can look at our headings, you can look at the subheadings and you can look at the box. Between these three elements you can completely bypass the main story and still know everything that is worth knowing.

WAN-IFRA: How do you maintain a feeling of brand unity given that the DNA is now published over such a massive geographical area?

SINHA: The paper has different sections. Local editions focus on local pages, whereas national pages, international pages, sports pages, business pages, are done centrally. Across editions you’ll find that some of the pages will be common. And with the sports pages, if there are four sports pages for instance, then one will be tailored to local sports. The local pages, whether it’s city or region or state, are specialized and unique to each edition.

WAN-IFRA: Where do you think the future of news lies in India?

PAREKH: Radio has tremendous scope, so does TV. Print has more scope, particularly English newspapers. Currently probably 15% of the households in the city [Ahmedabad] can read an English paper. But I would say now 2-3% go for an English newspaper. So there’s a huge growth potential. And it’s not that they don’t have spending power. They’re already buying at least one newspaper, but that’s in the Gujarati language. But eventually, their children are studying in English-speaking schools, so as they grow up they will be thinking and writing in English rather than in Gujarati. The will be communicating in English. So for us growth is going to be unlimited. English newspapers can grab readership from all the language newspapers from across the country, if not now, over a longer period of time.

There is one possibility that if there is a huge revolution in the availability of internet services then people will read an epaper rather than a printed paper. But the economics in India are totally the reverse of that in the West. There the newspaper is very expensive. In India newspapers are more or less free whereas internet is very expensive. A home delivered, printed newspaper costs roughly 25 times less than an internet connection. And if I want to read three or four newspapers I’ll still end up saving a lot of money if I’m only talking about reading habits.