SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Less than a week after the board of directors of The Hindu “decided” to appoint a professional from outside the family as the editor of the 132-year-old newspaper, the group’s business daily, The Hindu Business Line, is also slated to go the same way.
The paper’s joint editor, K. Venugopal—son of former Hindu editor G. Kasturi, a key player in the current round of the great HINDU mahayudh—who is in charge of Business Line, told a meeting of the paper’s reporters in Bombay today that Business Line would be getting a professional as editor in the next three months.
Venugopal is also reported to have indicated that, instead of looking for a name from outside the paper, a current staffer could don the role. Among the front-runners are D. Sampath Kumar, senior associate editor, and T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan, associate editor.
Hindu Business Line is in the midst of a management and editorial restructuring exercise being conducted by the global consultancy firm, McKinsey. Code-named “Project Kamadhenu”, the exercise has already seen Venugopal, a director in the company, play less of a role in the daily’s editorial operations.
As per published news reports, it was Venugopal’s brother, K. Balaji, who proposed the move to keep family members away from editorial positions at last week’s board meeting, where the name of The Hindu‘s Delhi bureau chief, Siddharth Varadarajan, was proposed as the next editor of the paper.
