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.
IJR 
Even minor developments in ‘The Hindu’ household create a lively and passionate debate in media & cyberspace. It shows the respect, awe and, love with which the people in general, and its readers in particular, view ‘The Hindu’. The narcissistic, navel-gazing, spoilt brats of the Kasturi family are not aware of it. Such an awareness would have engendered a sense of humility and responsibility in them.
Even though ‘The Hindu’ calls itself a ‘National Newspaper’, South India has been its stronghold. However that stronghold too has been shrinking for the last several years. The future prospects of ‘The Hindu’ appears to be very grim.
When India took a giant leap forward in the post-liberalisation era of the 1990, newspaper establishments like The Hindu failed to keep pace with the changing country. It is unfortunate that the owners of The Hindu, allowed their newspaper to stagnate in old ideological ideas while rest of the country moved into a new dimension.
Right now India does not have enough media. We have very few TV channels, and very few national newspapers. A country of more than 100 crore people needs more media outlets. Where are they going to come from? Old warhorses like The Hindu and few other papers have lost the game completely.
It will be very difficult for anyone to bring The Hindu back into the game. It is relatively easy to change the guy at the top, but it is virtually impossible to change an organisations inner work ethic and ideology.