New Delhi: The Publishers Guild of India has its first president, general secretary and elected treasuries. Senior journalist Seema Mustafa, founder of the news website The citizen, was elected president and Sanjay Kapoor, editor of the Delhi-based magazine Difficult news magazine was elected general secretary of the guild. Ananth Nath, editor of the Caravan magazine, which was the only valid nomination for the position of treasurer, was elected unopposed. The election was held on October 16 and the results were announced on Saturday.
Until this election, the members were chosen by consensus. The Editors Guild is considered the highest body of editors, and looks critically at both the media and the state. It was founded in 1978 with the two primary goals of protecting press freedom and raising the standards of editorial leadership for newspapers and magazines. Before the elections, the guild was headed by Shekhar Gupta.
Of the 195 members, 140 members voted in the election. While Mustafa got 87 votes, his opponent, MD Nalapat, received 51 votes. For the post of general secretary, Smita Prakash of the ANI news agency had taken on Kapoor. He got 50 votes, 40 less than Kapoor.
It is interesting that publishers like R. Jagannathan, who is the editorial director of Swarajya and Times Now’s Navika Kumar, who had resigned from the Guild in the past, also participated in the elections and supported the candidacy of Nalapat and Prakash. They participated under the pretext that their resignation was not accepted.
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