Does Siddharth Varadarajan’s resignation from The Hindu have implications for PR?

The resignation of The Hindu’s editor Siddharth Varadarajan via Twitter this week may have interesting implications for India’s PR community.

The Hindu is one of India’s top 5 newspapers and a highly respected paper for South India. In his Tweet (below) Varadarajan’s attributed a return to editorial control via the family ownership, as opposed to having independent professional editors, as the reason for his resignation. Varadarajan resigned after the newspaper’s board decided to move him from the editor’s chair to that of contributing editor and senior columnist.

The broader story is covered in Tehelka and Varadarajan has since done an interview with Best Media Info.

From a PR perspective it will be interesting to see whether this will impact how PR practitioners pitch stories to a major national paper. It is also reflective of the Indian media environment when many large papers (The Times of India, The Hindustan Times) are family business owned.