Catch News editor Shoma Chaudhury asked to step down by owners Rajasthan Patrika

The announcement has come as a shock to many employees.

Flix Media

Barely seven months after the Rajasthan Patrika group launched its English news website Catchnews.com, the management has asked its Editor-in-Chief Shoma Chaudhury to step down with immediate effect.

At least two sources and an email from Shoma to her team have confirmed that Shoma was asked not to turn up for work on February 29.

“In a completely unexpected development, on 27 February, I was called to Jaipur by the director of finance and told that, since Catch has now been successfully created and stabilized, Patrika no longer wants to keep me on as its editor-in-chief,” she wrote in an email to her staff on Monday morning.

“To say that I am stunned by this arbitrary behaviour would be an understatement,” she wrote, adding that, “To be abruptly divorced from it like this seems real injustice, to say the least.”

She said she would be addressing the team at 4PM on Monday. “I know this will come as a shock to all of you. As it has been for me. I wish it was otherwise,” she said in her email to the staff.

Catch News was launched in mid-2015 under the leadership of Shoma Chaudhury and founder and former editor of Mail Today Bharat Bhushan. In December 2015, they launched a Hindi website as well.

Shoma had earlier quit Tehelka magazine after it's editor Tarun Tejpal was accused of raping a colleague.

Here is the full text of the email