Chennai, Oct 21 (IANS): Top-level changes were decided at the city-based Kasturi & Sons Ltd, that owns papers like The Hindu, The Hindu Business Line and other media publications, at its board meeting here Monday with family members patching up their earlier differences and assuming important editorial responsibilities.
As per 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 decisions, Siddharth Varadarajan tweeted his decision to quit as editor with immediate effect. The company had offered Varadarajan the designation 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 their 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 - journalists and non-journalists - expressed their happiness at the developments.
"We welcome the management changes and the family taking over the controls. We are happy. The experiment to bring in managerial professionals has failed here," E.Gopal, president, The Hindu Office and National Press Employees Union, told IANS.
It is also learnt that the management is expected to conclude an agreement with the union on upward revision in retired employee pensions and the annual bonus.