Arun Anant ‘no longer’ CEO of The Hindu

Kasturi & Sons, publisher of English daily The Hindu, has announced that the company’s first CEO appointed two years ago, Arun Anant, ‘no longer’ holds the position. Arun Anant had joined the organisation in February 2012.

Former editor-in-chief and part of the owning family N Ram takes over as chairman, while his brother and former senior managing director N Murali takes over as co-chairman, Kasturi & Sons.

These decisions were taken at a meeting of the company’s board of directors held Monday, the newspaper published in its columns today.

On the editorial side, N Ravi has taken over as editor-in-chief of The Hindu, and Malini Parthasarathy as editor. Siddharth Varadarajan, the first editor from outside the owning family, was named contributing editor and senior columnist, The Hindu. He has since submitted his resignation.

The Board also decided to allocate specific responsibilities to other directors.

In a letter addressed to readers, N 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."

The letter further informed that the existing editorial arrangements for The Hindu BusinessLine, Frontline, Sportstar, and The Hindu (Tamil) will continue unchanged, and that the process of ‘professionalisation’, now involving a mix of shareholder-directors and other professionals, will continue.