DNA's Jitesh Rajdeo moves to Zee News as chief sales officer

Rajdeo has been with Zee for the last 13 years. He will report to Alok Agrawal, CEO, Zee News.

Zee News has recently brought on board Jitesh Rajdeo as chief sales officer for its bouquet of news channels. Rajdeo, erstwhile chief revenue officer, DNA, will handle the sales of the Zee News bouquet which includes Zee News, Zee Business, Zee News UP, Zee News Punjabi, Zee 24 Taas and 24 Ghanta.

Based in Mumbai, Rajdeo replaces Amit Tripathi, senior vice-president, sales. In his new profile, Rajdeo will head the sales function of all the news channels under the bouquet and report to Alok Agrawal, CEO, Zee News.

In an official communiqué, Agrawal says, "Rajdeo, being in the company for the past 13 years, had a good track record across various group channels in different roles. To put the planned growth into action, we have decided to aggressively take newer initiatives and hence want to ramp up our team."

Rajdeo has been associated with the Zee Group since 2000, having worked in various capacities in the organisation. He has worked as national sales head, Zee Cinema as well. In 2009, when Zee restructured its ad sales division to form two core clusters, Rajdeo was in charge of the cluster that included the regional GECs (general entertainment channels) and news channels of the group.

Earlier, Rajdeo has worked with Mukta Advertising, Capital Market Magazine, Asian Age , Multichannel India and then with Modi Entertainment Network. Rajdeo says that the biggest advantage of being into news channels in the digitisation era is that unlike the other entertainment content available, news can never be consumed in the recorded (and ad free) mode.

He adds, "Almost all the news channels have their own skew and each is specialised in their own programming core. For Zee News, the news bulletin ratio is higher and feature-based content is less. That's what I find most promising while entering this business."