A little over two years ago, Raju Narisetti, then editor of the Wall Street Journal's European edition, walked into the office of his boss Paul Steiger carrying a box of Belgian chocolates. Steiger's passion for these sweets was well known among the Journal's staff, and over the years, Steiger had become wary of employees bearing them: The chocolates often foretold a difficult conversation.

Sure enough, Narisetti had come to deliver bad news: After 13 years with the paper, he was leaving to start up a financial newspaper in his native India. Narisetti's decision shocked some of his colleagues—at 39, he was seen as a rising star at the Journal, a possible contender to replace Steiger as the paper's managing editor when Steiger retired the next year. But Steiger, Narisetti says, understood his decision—the Journal could not offer him an equivalent opportunity.

In some ways, the new publication, which is named Mint and began publishing in early 2007, allowed Narisetti to fulfill his ambition of starting an Indian version of the Journal while avoiding the bureaucracy and slowness that would have encumbered a project like this at Dow Jones.

"If we were launching a new paper at the Wall Street Journal—at least under the old management—we would have still been in focus groups," Narisetti says now, noting that the Journal only recently launched its luxury magazine, W.S.J., a project that had been under discussion since before he left the paper in 2006.

Prior to his departure, Narisetti had been lobbying for several years to get the Journal to invest more heavily in India, where he saw a golden opportunity given the country's rapidly expanding middle class, new stock and commodity markets, and an economic boom that was creating a thirst for financial news.

But the paper had been stuck in an unproductive partnership to launch an Indian edition of the Journal with Indian media giant Bennett Coleman & Co.—a deal that was going nowhere because the Indian government refuses to allow local editions of foreign newspapers to be printed in the country.

Narisetti saw the opportunity to run Mint from HT Media, one of India's largest media companies and the parent company of the Hindustan Times, as a way to quickly create the type of Indian Wall Street Journal he had been pushing for.

And Narisetti managed to bring along former colleagues at Dow Jones as well—because of his involvement, the Journal agreed to a co-branding partnership that gives Mint exclusive access to stories from the paper.