Despite being one of the most widely read Marathi newspapers in the country, the top Google News results for “Saamana” aren’t from the daily’s website but from leading English papers.

Saamana, after all, is not merely a city newspaper or a Shiv Sena mouthpiece, though it’s that too. It is a beat, a potential story for reporters to track each day, its editorials in Marathi and Hindi routinely making for news in the mainstream press. Not least because, as a reporter covering the Shiv Sena for an English newspaper in Mumbai noted, “they offer insights into the thinking of the party, which is the Thackeray family”.