MAM
Editors Guild unveils new Executive Committee for 2025–26
DELHI: The Editors Guild of India has moved swiftly to set the tone for the year ahead, unveiling a fresh Executive Committee packed with some of the country’s most influential newsroom leaders and veteran journalists. The new line-up, announced on 9 December 2025, signals both continuity and renewed editorial heft at a time when press freedom and media ethics remain at the centre of national debate.
The committee for the 2025–26 term features 23 members:
1. Ayaz Memon – Senior Journalist
2. Alok Mehta – Former Chief Editor, Outlook
3. Ashutosh – Co-founder and Editor, Satya Hindi
4. Jayant Mammen Mathew – Executive Editor, Malayalam Manorama
5. Kumkum Chadha – Senior Journalist, Hindustan Times
6. Kavita Devi – Editor-in-Chief, Khabar Lahariya
7. KN Hari Kumar – Former Editor-in-Chief, Deccan Herald and Prajavani
8. Madhav Nalapat – Editorial Director, ITV Network
9. Om Thanvi – Former Editor, Jansatta
10. Prakash Dubey – Group Editor, Dainik Bhaskar
11. Rashmi Koti – Managing Editor, Andolana
12. Raghav Bahl – Editor-in-Chief, The Quint
13. Raj Chengappa – Consulting Editor, TV Today Network
14. Rajdeep Sardesai – Consulting Editor, India Today
15. Ravi N – Former Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu
16. Sugata Srinivasaraju – Senior Journalist, Author and Columnist
17. Shekhar Gupta – Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, ThePrint
18. Seema Mustafa – Editor-in-Chief, The Citizen
19. Anant Nath – Editor, The Caravan
20. TN Ninan – Chairman, Business Standard
21. Vijay Naik – Consulting Editor (Delhi), Sakal Media Group
22. Bharat Bhushan – Senior Journalist and Columnist
23. Shrenik Rao – Editor-in-Chief, Madras Courier
In addition, the Guild has named two special invitees:
1. John Dayal, Consulting Editor, Indian Currents
2. Harish Khare, Former Editor-in-Chief, The Tribune
The announcement was formally issued by Guild President Sanjay Kapoor, General Secretary Raghavan Srinivasan, and Treasurer Teresa Rehman, underscoring a collective commitment to strengthening ethical journalism at a moment when the industry faces both political pressure and technological disruption.
With a committee spanning legacy newsroom chiefs, digital pioneers, and sharp-edged columnists, the Editors Guild appears intent on entering 2026 with a louder voice and a firmer spine—just when the Indian media landscape needs it most.
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
