Chennai: Top-level changes were decided at the city-based Kasturi & Sons Ltd, that owns papers like The Hindu, The Hindu Business Line and other publications, at its board meeting here yesterday with family members patching up their differences and assuming important editorial responsibilities.
According to the decision taken by the board of Kasturi & Sons, N Ravi will be the editor-in-chief and Malini Parthasarathy will be the editor of The Hindu. N Ram will become the chairman and publisher of The Hindu while
N Murali will be the co-chairman.
Consequent to the moves, Siddharth Varadarajan tweeted his decision to quit as editor with immediate effect. The company had offered Varadarajan the posts of contributing editor and senior columnist.
Incidentally, Varadarajan’s appointment in 2011 as the editor of the 124-year-old daily had triggered the resignations of three members of the family from senior editorial positions. He was appointed by Ram, after the latter retired from the post on attaining the age of 65 years.
N Ravi had then resigned as editor, Malini Parthasarathy as executive editor and Nirmala Lakshman as the joint editor but remained board members.
In his communication to employees, Ram said: “The decision to make deep-going changes was made chiefly on the ground that there were recurrent violations and defiance of the framework of the institution’s longstanding values on the business side, and recurrent violations and defiance of ‘Living Our Values’, the mandatory Code of Editorial Values applicable to The Hindu. “The whole effort is to restore employee morale, good industrial relations, and the trust of this newspaper’s more than two million readers,” he added.
“The existing editorial arrangements for Business Line, Frontline, Sportstar, and The Hindu (Tamil) will continue unchanged and the process of professionalisation, now involving a mix of shareholder-directors and other professionals, will continue,” he added.
In his circulars, Ram had said Arun Anant is no longer the chief executive officer (CEO) of Kasturi & Sons. Employees expressed their happiness at the
developments. IANS
