Healthy “Naya Pakistan” (Health Journalism)

Seminar in KP discusses media’s role in promoting health 

One third of infant deaths in Pakistan are due to malnutrition and 48 percent households face food shortage, said Peshawar University Teachers Association General Secretary Dr Fazl Nasir during a seminar held in the varsity on Monday. “Pakistan is among the three countries of the world where polio is still endemic and we need to invest in health workers, especially for improving maternal and child health,” she said. The seminar, titled “The role of journalism in promoting evidence-based health policy for reducing child mortality and improving maternal health”, was arranged by Mishal Pakistan in collaboration with Save the Children foundation and Peshawar University Teachers Association.

When journalists become ‘Unknown People'

By Farahnaz Zahid

My biggest high as a journalist is my byline. Having been a journalist for a fairly long time, the excitement has not lessened.

The day I know a story of mine will be published there is a wave of anticipation from the night before. With half-open eyes, I snap off the rubber band holding the rolled up newspaper in the morning, search for my story, and revisit it many times a day.

It is not simply narcissism, though every journo and writer is a bit of a self-centred narcissist inside. George Orwell got it right when he laid down the four motives to write in his essay “Why I write” and placed sheer egoism at the top because as he said “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

I will not digress into a debate about the difference between a journalist and a writer here. Somewhere, the lines are diffused and they tend to overlap.

Professional education: ‘Teach journalism in south Punjab colleges’

More than 300 journalists from Multan district organised a demonstration here on Sunday, demanding the introduction of journalism courses at colleges and universities in the south Punjab.

Currently journalism is taught at master’s level at Bahauddin Zakariya University and Islamia University Bahawalpur.

The protesting journalists gathered in front of the Multan Press Club. They claimed that students aspiring to become journalists were being deprived of professional education that, they said, resulted in lack of awareness about professional ethics and understanding. They said it was also one reason there were few journalists with a degree in journalism.

In the line of fire

By Kamal Siddiqi  Published: August 18, 2013

On Friday, four men on two motorcycles arrived at the street leading to our offices in Karachi and opened indiscriminate fire – shooting between 30 and 40 bullets before calmly walking away. Of the four, the two who pulled the triggers did not hide their faces behind any helmets. As they tried to then leave the scene, one motorcycle stalled and was started after some time. There was no one to check them. The police arrived forty minutes later.

Two people were injured in the firing. One was a guard who was stationed at the main gate of the office. The other victim, a lady from our marketing department. The condition of the guard is still not out of danger. We pray for his recovery.

Attacks on the media are nothing new in Pakistan. We are one of the most dangerous countries to work in if journalism is our profession. However what distinguished this attack from others was the brazen manner in which it was conducted.

Apple trains media experts on mobile journalism

LEADING global manufacturers of electronic devices, Apple Corporation, recently in Lagos trained Information and Communications Technology (ICT) journalists on easy and smarter ways of plying their trade with the help of its principal device, iPad.

 Explaining the new trend in media practice called Mobile Journalism (MoJo), a senior manager of the South African based Core Africa Group (CAG) in charge of sales and supplies of all Apple products in Africa, Mrs. Taryn Hyam, said the training became necessary to raise the bar of African media executives in reporting news stories from anywhere they find themselves rather than the old practice of returning to the newsroom for filling reports.

NDMA and PEMRA guide the Journalists on disastar reporting

During the two-day (August 5-6) media workshop, key speakers including former Chairman NDMA Lt Gen (Retd) Nadeem Ahmed, Director General (DG) Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), Mukhtar Ahmed, and others addressed the participants of the workshop. The participants were journalists of various media houses of the capital city.

At the end of the workshop, Chairman NDMA Maj General Saeed Aleem interacted with the media persons during Iftar dinner before he took part in the photo session along with the participants of the workshop. He said that media role was very crucial in the dissemination of information before and after any natural calamity and disaster. He also viewed the government was fully equipped to cope with the situation arising as a result of heavy rains as predicted in September, this year.

Book ; “Press, Pressmen and the Governments in Pakistan: Mishandling of Power and Positions”

“Press, Pressmen and the Governments in Pakistan: Mishandling of Power and Positions”, published by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. 

The book has been published by the HEC Pakistan and authored by Dr Shahzad Ali, distinguished assistant professor of Department of Mass Communication 

Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan and co-author Prof Dr Muhammad Khalid, Chairman Department of Mass Communication, University of Management and Technology, Lahore. The authors have dedicated the book to Habib Jalib calling him a “zealous revolutionist”, who believed that reticence is a sin’. 

Australia’s Richest Person Loses Media Source Case

Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart. (Bloomberg Photo)

By Agence France-Presse on 10:55 am August 7, 2013.

Sydney. Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart has lost a long-running legal bid to force a media group to hand over their source material in a messy dispute over her family’s mining fortune.

Rinehart had been trying to force West Australian Newspapers to surrender all letters, faxes, emails, legal advice, memos, text messages and recordings between their journalist Steve Pennells and her son, John Hancock.

As Newspapers and Magazines Struggle, Companies in Other Industries Are Hiring Journalists, Getting Into the Media Business. Why?

By Dan Lyons (Marketing fellow, HubSpot)

Not long ago the idea of a journalist going to work inside a company to do anything other than PR was pretty much unheard of. But lately every time you turn around you hear about another reporter take a job with a title like "director of content" and a role that involves leading some company's publishing efforts and/or becoming a writer of record for their brand.

IBM hired a reporter from BusinessWeek. Qualcomm hired one from USA Today. GE and LinkedIn hired journalists from Forbes. In the past few months Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, two big venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, hired journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Wired, respectively. Full disclosure: I'm the former technology editor at Newsweek, and now I'm a "marketing fellow" at HubSpot, a software company in Cambridge, Mass.

The Journalist and the Creative: An Unlikely Marriage

By Macaela Mackenzie

As a (very) recent college grad I was happy to land such a good gig at Ketchum, especially in such a tough economy for job seekers with little to no experience. But as a trained journalist, I was a little hesitant about crossing over to the "dark side", a.k.a. the world of public relations.

In the tight-knit circle of journalists, the world of PR and media relations is often dismissed as the place where the importance of writing skills, development of creative voice, real reporting gumption and compelling content production go to die. You’d be hard pressed to find a journalist who doesn’t roll his or her eyes each time a new press release rolls across their desk, and I’ve heard countless media relations professionals complain about how hard it is to find a member of the media who they can partner with easily. Even as a student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I was surprised to find so little overlap between journalism and marketing programs. The battle lines had been drawn. Journalist or Marketer: choose your sides, kids.