Sidharth Bhatia, who has helmed the editorial pages of DNA since the daily’s launch in 2005, has stepped down. He confirmed the development. With this, two senior editorial staffers have stepped down at the Mumbai-headquartered daily in as many months. Editor-at-large Ayaz Memon had resigned last month. The daily is widely believed to be going through a shakeup, but CEO K.U. Rao denied anything was unusual. “This is all part of normal attrition,” he said. Bhatia has worked as a journalist for 33 years, starting as a reporter at the Free Press Journal in 1976. He has worked in senior…

Rediff.com (NSDQ: REDF) has done away with its ‘iLand’ branded blogging platform and has launched an improved service that it simply calls Rediff Blogs. The new service has added some social features and is more customizable than the previous edition. There’s also the hook that blog posts might be featured alongside related Rediff content such as news.   

DB Corp., publisher of Dainik Bhaskar and Divya Bhaskar, and joint venture partner in DNA, opened its initial public issue of shares and was subscribed 0.62 times on day one. The price band of the issue is Rs185-212. Competitor Jagran Prakashan is trading at Rs125.40. The company plans to raise Rs381.85 crore from this issue, according to Moneycontrol.com. The company has received commitment worth Rs69.35 crore from anchor investors on Thursday, the financial portal reported. Nine anchor investors have subscribed to 32,71,500 equity shares at Rs212 per equity share. The total issue is of 18,175,000 equity shares.

Peter Bhatia, executive editor at The Oregonian, will succeed Sandra Mims Rowe as editor at the 159-year old publication. Rowe announced yesterday that she will be leaving the paper at the end of this year. Rowe has been editor since 1993. Bhatia, who has been a journalist for more than 30 years, is among the highest ranking journalists of Indian origin at American publications, alongside WashPost managing editor Raju Narisetti, WSJ international editor Nik Deogun and LA Times managing editor Davan Maharaj.

Arun Anant, former CEO at Bloomberg UTV (then UTVi), has set up management consulting firm Inc Value together with five partners. “We will be advising promoters and private equity companies post investment,” Anant said. The company will work in verticals such as Banking and financial services, ITES and BPO, IT products and services, media and entertainment, real estate and infrastructure and brand consultancy. The partners include Kaushik Mazumdar, a former director at General Atlantic; Raj Raman, former CEO at Bollywood Corp.; Kusal Roy, a former MD at Barclays Bank and C.S. Prasad Subramanian, former CTO (banking and financial services vertical)…

Here is a compilation of links that comprised our coverage of the restructuring of NDTV Networks that played out over several months. The cash burn by the general entertainment channel was becoming too much to bear for the parent company and NBCU shut the tap on funding (and also had to deal with its own merger). NDTV Networks bought out NBCU, then inked a Lifestyle deal with Scripps from which it got cash and an excellent valuation for what is essentially a one-channel business, paid back bond holders under favourable terms and now sold the entertainment channel to Turner. It…

Turner Asia, a unit of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), today said it has agreed in principle to acquire a 92% stake in general entertainment channel NDTV Imagine. Turner will buy a 76% stake from NDTV Networks Plc. for $67 million and will also invest $50 million in the business against a fresh issue of shares. We reported in October that Time Warner was close to acquiring about a 90% stake in NDTV Imagine. 

Reliance Mediaworks (formerly Adlabs) today said it has partnered with Los Angeles-based In-Three Inc. to set up the world’s largest 2D to 3D conversion facility in India. The project will start in February 2010. The facility will use In-Three’s proprietary technology called Dimensionalization for the conversion. The partnership can handle 15-20 feature films in a year, the companies said in a year. In May, Adlabs said it was setting up a major media outsourcing facility and will employ 1,200 people within a year.  Reliance Mediaworks is part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, which, through a unit, acquired 50%…

The latest in a series of high-level exits from Nasdaq-listed Rediff.com (NSDQ: REDF) is Salil Chandrashekar, director for product development. He confirmed the development, but declined to say where he was headed. The timing of the move is likely to pinch Rediff as Chandrashekar has been heading the execution of the portal’s minimalist approach. The shift, the brainchild of founder and chairman Ajit Balakrishnan, has met with mixed reactions from users and (by design) lower home page revenues.

Sunil Lulla, who stepped down as group CEO at Alva Brothers Entertainment, will join Times Global Broadcasting Co. Pvt. Ltd as CEO and MD. TGBCL broadcasts Times Now and ET Now. This will be Lulla’s second stint as CEO at Bennett, Coleman’s broadcasting subsidiary, where he worked for two years prior to joining Alva Brothers. TGBCL CEO Chintamani Rao has been named vice chairman. Rao, who is currently based in Mumbai, will move to New Delhi and also handle responsibilities in the group’s Private Treaties business, BCCL MD Vineet Jain said in an internal memo. Lulla will report to Jain.…

The answer (from this NYT story): due to a “troubling nexus” of business, politics and publishing that proved to be “draining on body and soul”. Raju Narisetti came to India in 2006 to set up a business newspaper for HT Media, leaving The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 13 years and rose to become deputy managing editor. Mint was launched in February 2007 and won acclaim for the quality of its journalism. The latest round of the Indian Readership Survey said Mint was the country’s second-largest business paper after The Economic Times. (Disclosure: I worked at Mint for…

Veteran media executive Sunil Lulla, group CEO at Alva Brothers Entertainment, has stepped down. He confirmed the development. Lulla joined the company as a director in February 2008 and also sat on the boards of group companies Miditech and Real Global Broadcasting. He set up Real under a joint venture with Turner Broadcasting. The channel launched in March 2009 as a general entertainment channel with a special focus on reality shows. It never really took off, however, and in September, Turner and Alva Brothers said the companies were “reassessing” their plans for the channel. Operations have been significantly downsized. With…

While the grouse is not new, it’s not everyday that a CEO of a large network lashes out against the powerful cable operators. Star India CEO Uday Shankar, also a former journalist and editor, has lashed out against cable operators, saying their underdeclaration of revenues is crippling the Pay TV business. Shankar said cable operators were underdeclaring revenues by as much as 90%.

The results of the latest round of Indian Readership Survey is out and here’s a compilation of how some of the most popular English newspapers and magazines fared. All figures in this story are all-India average issue readership. Of the 25 English newspapers covered by this round, 12 registered an increase in readership, three remained static, nine registered a drop and one could not be compared as it wasn’t covered during the previous round.

Prominent Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi, winner of the World Association of Newspapers’ 2009 Golden Pen Award, has resigned from the editorship of Daily Times and the paper’s sister publication in Urdu, Daily AajKal, according to the Cafe Pyala blog. The blog quotes a mail from Sethi, in which he says he has resigned as the editor of the paper and as a director of the company, while four senior colleagues has also left with him, owing to serious differences with the management. Sethi was jailed in 1999 by the Nawas Sharif government.

Sun TV Network Ltd today said it was raising ad rates on its flagship Tamil channel by 9-33% w.e.f 1 January 2010. It has also raised ad rates and broadcast fee (received from content creators who essentially lease air time) across all of the company’s Tamil channels. Revised ad rates for the company’s entertainment channels in other south Indian languages will be announced soon. Sun TV is the dominant broadcaster in South India, with properties in all four states.

Shantonu Aditya, CEO of Bloomberg UTV (formerly UTVi), is stepping down, a person familiar with the development said. This is said to be Aditya’s last week at the company. Aditya joined UTV Broadcasting as executive director in April 2007. He oversaw four channels—Bindass, Bindass Movies, UTV Movies and World Movies. In June 2008, when Arun Anant quit as the CEO of UTVi, Aditya took on additional responsibilities as the CEO of the business news channel.

President Pratibha Patil last week nominated senior journalist H.K. Dua and former Hindustan Unilever chairman Ashok Ganguly to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s Parliament. Ganguly is also the chairman of ABP Ltd, the Kolkata-headquartered company that owns Ananda Bazar Patrika and Star News, among other media properties.   

Direct-to-home service provider Dish TV Ltd today said it is raising $100 million through an issue of global depository receipts, or GDRs, to US-based private equity firm Apollo Management. The company will issue 117,035 GDRs of $854.5 each. Each GDR represents 1,000 underlying equity shares. Post the issue, Apollo will own 11% of the expanded capital of Dish TV, which is India’s leading DTH service provider. The Dish TV scrip closed at Rs40.65 on Monday, up 0.74% from its previous close. The benchmark Sensex closed marginally up.