For years the business pages of The Hindu used to be among the strengths of the daily winning sizeable readership and advertisements. P A Seshan (Leo), in-charge of the business pages for a few decades, wrote extensively on corporates. He was liberal in reporting on corporates irrespective of their size and also efficiently used the rapport he maintained with the business barons. In the era when the family-owned, closely-held companies were wary of sharing information, Leo’s News & Notes were avidly followed for the information they provided, though there was not much of analysis or comments, but just facts.
Seshan groomed younger journalists like P B Thyagarajan, S Parthasarathy… Later C R L Narasimhan, who moved over from State Bank and K T Jagannathan expanded coverage of banks and companies through interviews.
Putting the business pages in-charge of Suresh Seshadri, recruited from Reuters a couple of years ago, saw a marked shift. There was much less of reports on corporate performance, interviews, plant visits… On several days there were extensive reports from Reuters on global developments but with little coverage of southern corporates.
With Seshadri moving out and dynamic Raghuvir Srinivasan, who shifted to Business Line, returning to The Hindu to head the business bureau, one can look forward to more of first-hand reports and interviews that are bound to make the business columns more varied and lively.
With the present terms of Editor Mukund Padmanabhan and Managing Director Rajiv C Lochan coming to end, there may be other changes. With old pressures of the family factions re-surfacing, will there be a return of a family-editor?
Is there hope for a balanced fare more in tune with the title of the paper, The Hindu? A change in its version of ‘secularism,’ fortified by the usual suspects – Gopalakrishna Gandhi, Shiv Visvanathan and the neo reformer, T M Krishna? And a little less focus on the waning phase of the leftists of West Bengal? – SV
