Media Musical Chairs

There is such a frenetic game of musical chairs going on in the media these days that we can hardly keep up. So we decided to just do a short post, combining all the major transitions we do know about or have heard about...

First up, rumours are swirling that Fahd Hussain, who recently left Express TV to join Dunya, may be signing up with Aaj TV, where Talat Hussain recently announced his departure. According to this website, Fahd has been involved in some clashes with Dunya TV's owner Mian Aamir Mahmood and is also finding it frustrating not to yet have found a primetime slot there. We do not know how true these particular reports are but Fahd himself apparently refuses to either confirm or deny the rumours of negotiations with Aaj, which might be some sort of indication.

Matters are complicated by further rumours that Talat Hussain's apparent move to DawnNews may have hit snags over his desire to bring with him about half a dozen other subordinates at fairly high salaries, at which DawnNews management has balked. There are also reports that Aaj management is going full throttle to retain Talat by offering to address the issues he had with the channel. If indeed either or both of these reports are true, and Talat does in fact stay at Aaj, obviously there would not be any empty slot for Fahd to move into.

In any case, that's enough of the rumours. What is certain are the following:

Sana Bucha, the host of Crisis Cell who recently resigned from Geo to go to ARY, is coming back to Geo, believe it or not. Apparently, she began having doubts about her move to ARY almost immediately upon signing up with them, realizing (a bit late) that she would be reporting to one President Dr S&M there. Even before she had formally begun work there, however, she therefore allowed herself to be poached by the Express Media Group. This is when it got even more interesting. Having signed up with Express (in what capacity, whether for the Express Tribune or for their channels, we are not quite sure), she was beseeched by a rather dramatic Mir Ibrahim Rahman (MIR) to come back to the Geo fold. Apparently she was put under a lot of family pressure (the Rahmans know her family) and finally buckled on the condition that MIR would handle the embarrassment with the Express management. In this short, almost virtual job hopping spree, it is said that she managed to come back to Geo at double her previous salary. A good strategy if you can swing it.

Meanwhile, from the looks of this return, the negotiations that Geo was having with Meher Bokhari (which have been confirmed) to wean her away from Samaa, seem to have come to naught.

But Geo has managed to snag one other big fish, so to speak. As we reported earlier (in rumour terms), Dr Shahista Wahidi is all set to take over the morning show at Geo, replacing the once-favoured Nadia Khan. Wahidi has left ARY and scooted over to Geo's welcoming arms at a whopping salary. Her stint will begin anon.

In already established news, Zaffar Abbas has formally taken over (on October 4) as Editor Dawn from the departing Abbas Nasir, who has moved back to London with his family after four-years at the helm of the paper. And Aaj TV has introduced former bureaucrat and columnist Orya Maqbool Jan and former The News editor Salim Bokhari as the bickering replacements for Mushtaq Minhas and Nusrat Javed in their Bolta Pakistan programme. The latter duo, as we all know, now bicker over at Dunya TV on Dunya Mere Aagay.

On an unrelated note, Arif Nizami's Pakistan Today is now said to launch today (October 5) in Lahore and, interestingly, will be published in the tabloid format, making it the country's first such daily.

Dawn Group Shuffles

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.

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.

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.