So we hear that Arifa Noor, the current editor of the Herald will be taking over as the Resident Editor of Dawn in Islamabad once Zaffar Abbas moves to Karachi to take over as the Editor of Dawn. Current Dawn Editor Abbas Nasir is likely to relinquish charge by July.
No news yet on who Arifa Noor's replacement will be.
Showing posts with label Abbas Nasir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abbas Nasir. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
A New Dawn, Again
So, precisely as we told you last October and predicted, things have come to pass at the Dawn Media Group. The Editor of Dawn and DawnNews (the tv channel), Abbas Nasir has resigned. And his position will be taken up by Zaffar Abbas, currently the Resident Editor of Dawn in Islamabad.
The announcement was officially made internally at Dawn at an 'emergency meeting' called by Dawn Media Group owner, Ms. Amber Saigol, a couple of days ago. Nasir will continue in his post till June, when the changeover would take place.
As we reported earlier, Nasir's resignation had been in the works for a while now and was motivated mainly by personal reasons - he and his family would like to move back to London. However, there had also been murmurs of resentment within the group about the slide in Dawn's cache as the paper of choice for readers as well as, for some, in its quality. For what it's worth, I personally think it had really improved in certain aspects such as the front page and its reporting from the Frontier and tribal areas. Former editor Ahmed Ali Khan's era is often touted as the golden era of Dawn, yet in reality was also one of its most boring and staid periods, where you were more likely to find what was happening in Togo on the front page rather than in Karachi. Abbas Nasir had at least brought Dawn back to earth in Pakistan.
The problems at the paper had much more to do with increased competition from the electronic media (television and the web), falling revenues because of economic conditions (leading to ill-advised moves like the confused amalgamation of all the magazines as Images on Sunday), and the white elephant DawnNews that the newspaper was burdened with.
In fact, the fall in revenues has been so drastic that reports say Dawn is off by 50 per cent on its advertising targets. Obviously this is largely because of the recessionary trends in the country as a whole, which has seen marketing budgets slashed across the board in Pakistan. Couple this with dollar devaluations and rising costs - of newsprint, printing machinery and salaries (which Nasir raised all over Dawn to his credit) - and you can pretty much see where things are headed. The result has been retrenchments, the first bunch of which occurred at DawnNews a few months ago, and which have now been supplemented by further sackings within Dawn.
According to sources, many people in production sections have already been laid off recently while the next to go are likely to be those on contract (i.e. not permanent employees), which includes a number of people on the editorial staff as well as those seniors hired post-retirement. These fresh retrenchments have obviously also led to employee resentment within Dawn and may have hastened Nasir's departure.
Zaffar Abbas is a well-respected senior journalist. He began as a reporter for (the now deceased) Star and Herald and was long associated with BBC before coming on board as Dawn's Islamabad editor. Like Nasir, no one doubts his professional credentials. What remains to be seen, however, is how he will be able to recast Dawn in a time of pinching austerity drives, flagging morale and technological innovation that is making the print media a problematic enterprise the world over.
The announcement was officially made internally at Dawn at an 'emergency meeting' called by Dawn Media Group owner, Ms. Amber Saigol, a couple of days ago. Nasir will continue in his post till June, when the changeover would take place.
As we reported earlier, Nasir's resignation had been in the works for a while now and was motivated mainly by personal reasons - he and his family would like to move back to London. However, there had also been murmurs of resentment within the group about the slide in Dawn's cache as the paper of choice for readers as well as, for some, in its quality. For what it's worth, I personally think it had really improved in certain aspects such as the front page and its reporting from the Frontier and tribal areas. Former editor Ahmed Ali Khan's era is often touted as the golden era of Dawn, yet in reality was also one of its most boring and staid periods, where you were more likely to find what was happening in Togo on the front page rather than in Karachi. Abbas Nasir had at least brought Dawn back to earth in Pakistan.
The problems at the paper had much more to do with increased competition from the electronic media (television and the web), falling revenues because of economic conditions (leading to ill-advised moves like the confused amalgamation of all the magazines as Images on Sunday), and the white elephant DawnNews that the newspaper was burdened with.
In fact, the fall in revenues has been so drastic that reports say Dawn is off by 50 per cent on its advertising targets. Obviously this is largely because of the recessionary trends in the country as a whole, which has seen marketing budgets slashed across the board in Pakistan. Couple this with dollar devaluations and rising costs - of newsprint, printing machinery and salaries (which Nasir raised all over Dawn to his credit) - and you can pretty much see where things are headed. The result has been retrenchments, the first bunch of which occurred at DawnNews a few months ago, and which have now been supplemented by further sackings within Dawn.
According to sources, many people in production sections have already been laid off recently while the next to go are likely to be those on contract (i.e. not permanent employees), which includes a number of people on the editorial staff as well as those seniors hired post-retirement. These fresh retrenchments have obviously also led to employee resentment within Dawn and may have hastened Nasir's departure.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Editorial Makeovers in the Offing?
There are some very interesting things happening in the media sector, our moles are telling us... It would seem that some major upheavals are about to take place in the English language print media. Yes, there is a (rather large) world beyond what's happening at The Nation and the upcoming International Herald Tribune (Pakistan franchise) being put together by Sultan Lakhani.
First, that rather redundant paper known as the Daily Times, whose only utility as a second or third paper seems to be to let the world at large know about what the Taseers an their friends are up to.
It turns out that the ENTIRE SENIOR EDITORIAL STAFF has submitted their resignations, including founding editor Najam Sethi, Aaj Kal's (the Urdu version of the aforesaid Daily Times) editor Khalid Ahmed and News Editor Ejaz Haider. The apparent reason? Non-payment of salaries and running costs for over two months. It seems Governor Taseer has decided to stop throwing good money after bad investments. Even if they did provide his daughters free publicity for their jewellery and artistic ventures. On the other hand, perhaps daddy held back his money because he felt there wasn't enough coverage of his family in Sunday.So where will the editorial staff go? Well, they always have The Friday Times
to fall back on, don't they. And at least Sethi and Haider (whose email chat status recently has been "Goodbye Daily Times") have built up a nice sideline with their television programmes on Dunya TV and DawnNews. We'll have to wait and see what happens to Daily Times though.
The other big shocker concerns that bastion of tradition and staid-ness, Dawn. Rumours are rife within the establishment that editor Abbas Nasir - who had come in as editor only just over three years ago after previous editor Saleem Asmi was laterally shifted - is getting ready to call it a day and go back to London with his family. You may recall that he was the South Asia head at the BBC in London before he shifted to Karachi for the Dawn assignment. This shift may happen as early as the end of the year or by the middle of next year and is apparently motivated purely by personal reasons, or so they say. Such a move would obviously mean that a search would begin once again - if it has not already - for a worthy successor for the most powerful job in English journalism in Pakistan. My money rides on Zaffar Abbas, currently Dawn's Resident Editor in Islamabad, moving into the position.
In any case, remember, you heard it here first.
The other big shocker concerns that bastion of tradition and staid-ness, Dawn. Rumours are rife within the establishment that editor Abbas Nasir - who had come in as editor only just over three years ago after previous editor Saleem Asmi was laterally shifted - is getting ready to call it a day and go back to London with his family. You may recall that he was the South Asia head at the BBC in London before he shifted to Karachi for the Dawn assignment. This shift may happen as early as the end of the year or by the middle of next year and is apparently motivated purely by personal reasons, or so they say. Such a move would obviously mean that a search would begin once again - if it has not already - for a worthy successor for the most powerful job in English journalism in Pakistan. My money rides on Zaffar Abbas, currently Dawn's Resident Editor in Islamabad, moving into the position.
In any case, remember, you heard it here first.
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