It was not that news never appeared on the front page before the 1958 transformation. A recent discovery by The Hindu’s archivists was that between June 2, 1941 and the big day, news did appear on Page 1 once a week, on Mondays for the most part but for a few intervening years on Sundays instead of Mondays. News on the front page can be said to have gone through a one-day-in-a-week apprenticeship for a period lasting nearly 17 years.

There was no question of taking readers or advertisers for granted even when change was in the air. According to Rangaswami Parthasarathy’s history, A Hundred Years of The Hindu: The Epic Story of Indian Nationalism (published by Kasturi & Sons Ltd., Chennai in September 1978), the newspaper polled its readers and was “agreeably surprised when it found that a large majority of readers and advertisers liked to have news displayed on the front page. That decided it and [Editor] Kasturi Srinivasan gave the green signal to go ahead with arrangements to bring about the change on Pongal day.”

Most Indian dailies had by then brought news to the front page. The Hindu remained in the company of The Times of London in retaining the tradition. Interestingly, The Times itself made the change only on May 3, 1966 – eight years after The Hindu took the leap.

Trust is the most important asset of a serious newspaper. “Our Front Page,” the third editorial published on January 14, 1958 and reproduced here, is a fine example of how a great newspaper wins and renews trust by being transparent and by communicating openly with its readers, advertisers, and distributors. The interplay of tradition and modernity, of continuity and change is an important theme here. So is the commitment to maintain “the high standards of journalism” as a “public service.” The observation that “we have moved into an age when events go rushing by in such headlong fashion that a reader to-day has often no time even to pause ‘to open his paper’ for the news but must get it the moment he picks his paper up” sounds contemporary (except that in several mature media markets, although not in India, fewer and fewer young people seem to be picking up printed newspapers even to scan the front page). To those readers who preferred the old format, the editorial was almost apologetic: “To them we respectfully submit that what has happened is merely a change in arrangement, in make-up: a switch of the middle page to the front.”

Heralding the change, The Hindu began publishing from December 1957 a series of advertisements headlined “A new look in the new year” and “Front page news.” Readers were given a preview, in the innovative form of a dummy in miniature supplied with the newspaper on January 8, 1958. Some 85,000 copies were sent out.

Tuesday, January 14, 1958 – the day of the Pongal and Sankranti festivals – also witnessed some changes in layout, although there was no radical departure in the manner of news presentation. Aside from the editorial explaining the “facial change,” there was Tata Steel’s large and appropriately illustrated advertisement greeting the change: “To the grand old lady of Mount Road, greetings on her new make-up. May she continue to render outstanding service for many, many years to come!”

In that 80th year of publication, there was another facial change, in a stylish bow to the gathering forces of modernisation. The ornamental German-style lettering of the masthead gave way to the modern typeface that is still being used, with some fine-tuning, in this 130th year of the founding of India’s National Newspaper.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail