The counterintuitive thing about pitching the largest English-language daily on earth is that its size makes it harder to reach, not easier. People assume a paper with that much space must have room for them. In practice the scale means every desk is triaged, every national inbox is saturated, and the volume of material arriving each day means an unremarkable pitch is not rejected so much as never surfaced.
The paper is reachable. The honest answer to how to get featured in Times of India is simply that the route is narrower than its page count suggests, and that it runs through cities rather than through the masthead.
Times of India has been published since 1838, when it started life as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, and it is now put out by Bennett, Coleman and Company under the Times Group umbrella. That history matters less than one structural fact: it is not really one newspaper. It is a federation of city editions sharing a name, and understanding that is most of what separates a pitch that lands from one that does not.
The Scale Works Against You, Not For You
Start with what you are competing against, because it reframes the whole exercise.
A national English daily in India is covering a market of well over a billion people, dozens of state governments, every major industry, and a startup ecosystem producing news daily. The business desk is not short of stories. It is short of time to evaluate them. That means your pitch is not being weighed against a quality bar so much as against an attention bar, and the attention bar is cleared by specificity rather than by importance.
This is why pitches that would work at a trade publication fail here. A trade outlet covering your sector will read four paragraphs about your company because your company is their beat. A national desk will not, because your company is one of ten thousand that could write the same four paragraphs.
What clears the bar is a story that is already assembled. Not an idea a reporter would have to develop, but a thing that happened, with a number, in a named place, to named people, which the reporter could write in ninety minutes. Lower the work required and you raise your odds far more than by raising the importance of your subject.
There is a second consequence of the scale that catches people out. Because the paper publishes so much, a weak placement is genuinely possible, and it is not the win it looks like. A two-line mention in an aggregated roundup carries the masthead and almost none of the authority, and chasing those produces a media page full of links that nobody who matters will read past. Aim for the piece where your name appears in a sentence a reporter wrote on purpose.
Decide Which Times of India You Mean
Here is the rule that governs everything else, and I think of it as the City-First Rule: pitch the city where the story physically happened, and let national pickup follow rather than lead.
The paper runs separate city editions with their own newsrooms and their own supplements, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad and more, and each has local desks that need local stories every single day. That daily need is the opening. A national business editor has no shortage of candidates. A city desk filling a city page has a recurring appetite for credible local news and considerably fewer good submissions.
So locate your story geographically before you write a word. Where are the customers, the office, the hiring, the event, the affected people? If your company employs sixty people in Pune, the Pune desk is interested in Pune employment in a way no national desk will be. If your data covers Bengaluru traffic patterns, that is a Bengaluru story that a national desk might later aggregate.
The city supplements are a separate and softer target again. Those pages cover lifestyle, culture, food, and local personalities, and they are substantially easier to reach than the news desks. For a consumer brand, a restaurant, a designer, or a founder with a genuinely interesting personal story, the city supplement is often the realistic first placement, and it still produces an indexed article on one of the most-visited English news domains in the world.
Treat that first placement as infrastructure rather than as the goal. Once you have been published once on the domain, every subsequent pitch arrives from someone the paper has already printed, which measurably changes how it is read. Journalists check whether a source has been quoted before, and a prior appearance functions as a reference even when it came from a softer desk than the one you are now pitching.
Three Entry Points That Still Open
Three routes work with any consistency when you are working out how to get featured in Times of India. Everything else is noise.
The first is the city desk with a local news story, which I have described. This is the highest-probability route and the one most foreign pitchers ignore entirely because they want the national byline.
The second is expert sourcing, which is slower and compounds. Rather than pitching a story about yourself, you make yourself available as the person a reporter calls when a subject comes up. That means a short, factual note to reporters who cover your area, stating precisely what you can speak to and what data you hold, with no story attached and no ask. Most will not reply. The ones who file it will come back, sometimes months later, usually on deadline, and the appearance you get is a quote in somebody else’s article. That is worth more than it sounds: it is editorial, it is unpaid, it is credible, and it is repeatable once you are in a reporter’s contacts.
The third is the paper’s blogging platform, which hosts contributed writing from invited authors under the Times of India brand. It is a genuine route to a byline on the domain and it is judged on writing and on whether you have standing to write the piece. It is not the newspaper, and anyone telling you a blog post there is the same as a reported feature is selling you something. It is still a real, indexed, credible byline, and for building the kind of entity signals that show up when someone searches your name it does most of the same work.
Write for an Indian Reader, Not a Translated One
The most common tell in a foreign pitch is not the content. It is the register.
Indian English in a national daily has its own conventions and a pitch written in American business English reads as outsourced. Figures are given in lakhs and crores in domestic contexts, not in millions. Dates and quarters often reference the Indian financial year, running April to March, which means your Q1 and the desk’s Q1 are different quarters. Place names, state names, and regulator names need to be correct and current, and getting a regulator’s name wrong signals immediately that you do not follow the market you are claiming to comment on.
Beyond vocabulary there is the question of what counts as a stake. A story framed around a global trend with India as an example reads as condescending. The same story framed around what is happening in India, with the global trend as context, reads as reporting. That is a reordering of the same two facts and it changes how the pitch is received entirely.
If you do not know the market well enough to do this, the honest fix is to have someone who does read your pitch before it goes. One pass from a person who reads the paper daily will catch more than a week of your own editing.
The same principle applies to timing. Indian news cycles have their own rhythms, the Union Budget in February, festival season commerce coverage through autumn, the academic and hiring calendars, state election cycles that dominate regional desks for weeks. A pitch that collides with a state election in that city will be ignored no matter how good it is, because the desk has no space. A pitch that attaches to the budget cycle or to festival-season consumer behaviour arrives with a reason to run now.
Checking what is dominating that city’s pages this week takes five minutes and tells you whether to send today or wait a fortnight.
The Paid Content Question, Answered Honestly
You will encounter this and most guides avoid it, so here is the plain version.
Bennett, Coleman and Company operates a commercial content arm through which brands can purchase placement in clearly commercial space. That business is real, it is longstanding, and the practice of publishers selling marked promotional content is not unique to this group. What you need to understand is that it is a media buy. It is priced like advertising, it is labelled as promotional, and a reporter had no editorial judgement in it.
That makes it useful for some goals and useless for others. If you want a dated, indexed page on a high-authority domain that corroborates who you are, which is a legitimate objective for entity building and for AI citation, paid placement can serve that. If you want the credibility that comes from a journalist choosing to write about you, it cannot, and presenting it as though it can is the kind of thing that gets noticed by the people you are trying to impress.
Across the 1,016 publication catalogue Instant Press works from, the median placement runs about $1,500 and 96% of those outlets are Google-indexed, and the useful mental separation is exactly this one. Paid placements buy corroboration and reach. Earned coverage buys credibility. Both are real, they cost different things, and conflating them is how clients end up disappointed by a product that did exactly what it said.
Where This Goes Next
The thing worth watching is what happens to a placement after publication, because that is changing faster than the pitching.
A story on this domain used to be valuable mainly for the humans who read it and for the search ranking it earned. Increasingly it is valuable because answer engines reading the open web treat a major indexed daily as a corroborating source when deciding what to say about an entity. That shifts the calculus on city editions and supplements, which were always treated as the consolation prize: a city-page story that names you correctly and dates your claim feeds the same machinery as a national one.
So the version of how to get featured in Times of India that will age well is the unglamorous one. Build a local story the city desk can run this week, make yourself genuinely useful to two reporters who cover your subject, and let the national byline arrive as a consequence of being someone the paper has already published rather than as the thing you set out to buy.