By Arun Kumar,IANS,
Washington : The Washington Post Tuesday named two managing editors, one of them a person of Indian origin and the other the first woman to hold that title in the paper’s history to speed up the merger of the company’s print and online newsrooms.
Raju Narisetti, a former deputy managing editor of the Wall Stret Journal,will oversee the paper’s style and other feature sections. He becomes the second person of Indian origin to take up a leadership position in a major US daily.
The other new managing director, Elizabeth Spayd, will be responsible for the hard-news sections of the newspaper, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli announced.
Narisetti, 42, launched a national business newspaper in India in 2007. The Indian-American worked with Brauchli in several roles at the Journal, the newspaper where Brauchli was the top editor until owner Rupert Murdoch helped pressure him into leaving last spring.
Narisetti, he said, “is quite a visionary in journalistic terms. He understands where the media is going. The combination of these two should prove very strong for The Post in the near term. In the longer term, both of these people are just outstanding journalists.”
Narisetti was born in India and spent his first 18 years there, before enrolling in Indiana University in 1989 and earning a master’s degree in journalism. He worked with Brauchli as a deputy national editor at the Journal, and again when he supervised the Journal’s European editions from Brussels, and Brauchli was global news editor.
Narisetti resigned two weeks ago as founding editor of the Mint, which was conceived as a joint publication and Web site in India. “When you’re crazy enough to start a newspaper in 2007, you rethink a lot of the approaches to it,” he said. “It gives you the luxury of a lot of fresh ideas that an existing newspaper doesn’t have.”
Earlier, in May last year the Los Angeles Times promoted another Indian American journalist Davan Maharaj from business editor to managing editor making him the third-ranking editor at the fourth-largest newspaper in the country.
As Managing Editor at the LA Times, Davan Maharaj assumed oversight of Foreign, National, Metro, Business, Science and Sports. The Times Business Editor since February 2007, Maharaj is now charged with further integrating the print and Web story pipelines.
Maharaj, 45, has worked as a reporter for The Times in Orange County, Los Angeles and East Africa. His six-part series “Living on Pennies,” in collaboration with Times photographer Francine Orr, won the 2005 Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing and inspired readers to donate tens of thousands of dollars to aid agencies working in Africa.