Top Level Changes at DNA

New ad sales and revenue head roped in; K U Rao remains CEO but for non business activities; Dipayan Chowdhury sent back to Delhi.

Rajat Arora | Delhi | March 21, 2011

In the aftermath of declining readership and falling short of sales targets, Mumbai based English daily DNA is undergoing senior level changes where the owners of the newspaper Diligent Media Corporation has brought in Sr. Vice President and Network Sales Head of Zee TV Jitesh Rajdeo as Sales Head for the entire ad sales and business activities. Jitesh will report into Joy Chakraborthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Zee TV.

Jitesh Rajdeo has been a long term associate with Zee TV who joined the channel towards the end of 2001. He is currently serving Zee TV as Network Sales Head.

Confirming the development with BestMediaInfo.com, Joy Chakraborthy said, “Jitesh has just joined and getting hands on the functions thoroughly.”

However, Joy denied commenting on further changes in existing roles and said that he would be in position to comment on this in a day or two. But BestMediaInfo.com has learnt from the highly placed sources in the industry that K U Rao will now continue as CEO heading non business activities. Sources argue that since Jitesh will head the revenue functions and report into Joy, automatically K U Rao is left with the non business activities.

At the other hand, Dipayan Chowdhury, who was made National Sales Head a year back, is being sent back to Delhi. Dipayan was elevated to the position of Executive Vice President (Revenues) in March 2010.

Diligent Media Corporation, which owns DNA (Daily News & Analysis), is a joint venture between two industry majors – the Dainik Bhaskar Group and Zee Group and as per the agreement of JV, both the group enjoy the control over the newspaper for a certain period. Currently, the Diligent Media Corporation is said to be under Zee Group's control.

K U Rao had joined DNA as CEO on October 4, 2006. Prior to joining DNA, Rao had a strong sales background but with Non-media company. Rao had spent 12 years with Shell as Global Head of Sales & Business Development for the car care business of Shell Lubricants, London.

Dipayan had joined the organization in 2006 from Hindustan Times. He has close to 19 years of experience across media and FMCG sectors. He is an MBA and an IIM smp (Calcutta) alumni and he started his career with Pepsi and was instrumental in launching the brand in Delhi. He also had stints in other newspapers such as ABP and Business Standard.

Rajat.Arora@BestMediaInfo.com

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