The newspaper industry has been the traditional source of news for generations. However, the industry has been facing several challenges – (a) invasion of electronic media (TV and Internet) which has resulted in a steep decline for newspaper readership in the West, (b) increase in newsprint costs and uncertain fluctuations in exchange rates, (c) declining advertiser interest especially in the context of increasing popularity of digital media and (d) internal operational inefficiencies. While several of these challenges are ‘external’ and generic to the industry as a whole, solving ‘operational inefficiencies’ is much more under control of individual players. Newspaper companies have ongoing initiatives to improve their own operational performance, however they have never had a way to know “how good is good”. Should an improvement in sales productivity by 15% be considered good or is there a lot of room for further improvement? Should production waste of 3.5% be considered enough or is it possible to bring it down further? These questions have never been answered. The root cause for this has been the lack of an industry-wide benchmarking exercise of typical operating parameters for newspaper companies. It is in this context that a holistic business-system encompassing benchmarking exercise was launched. The objective of this benchmarking exercise was two-fold: 

• Identify improvement areas for participating organizations across the entire business system 
• Help improve operations efficiency of the industry as a whole