During the seventh session of the 15th World Editors Forum, Raju Narisetti's, Managing Editor at Mint, India, asked the question, "Can ethics sell papers?" using the story of his recently launched paper as the answer.

Mint is a business newspaper which launched in February 2007, in a market that already had five national business papers. How was Mint suppose to survive this competition and establish itself in the market and among the readers? The answer was ethics.

Before the launch of Mint, Mr Narisetti and others working at the newspaper to be, spent six months talking to potential readers. According to their findings, readers noted the lack of credibility and clarity in Indian newspapers as their biggest problems.

So Mr Narisetti and Mint set out to change this by bringing transparency and accessibility to Indian news media. Policies were created, an extensive code of conduct written, all viewable on the website. Mistakes were corrected and analyses of how those were made was published at the end of the year in the paper. Adverts are always clearly depicted as that and nothing else.

So how has Mint managed in a competetive market? In only a year and a half the paper sells 120,000 copies a day. 87% of these are subscriptions. It has become the second biggest business paper in Dehli, Mumbai and Bangalore.