In FATA, radio is the only voice
Twice, I missed the cadet college test because the only source of news was newspapers, and the admissions news failed to reach me in time. Even today, students and the people of Fata don’t get news in real time. An international media development organization in Pakistan has trained the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) broadcasters on public service announcements (PSAs) in training sessions held in Islamabad Pakistan. Broadcasters from local radio stations have attended this five day, hands on training on PSAs. While PSAs are used widely elsewhere in the world, they have never been used by these stations in Pakistan ...
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Bailing out Radio Pakistan
In his letter to the editor of The Express Tribune on February 28, Radio Pakistan Director General Murtaza Solangi defended the proposed tax of 2% on mobile phone users on every recharge to make public radio financially stable. If the additional tax was unacceptable, Solangi said, people should come up with counter-proposals for Radio Pakistan to stay afloat. Solangi says: “At the end of the day, the choice is either to have a public broadcaster — as the rest of the world does — or shut it down. If it needs to be retained, then people need to tell us how.” First ...
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Who is @SundusRasheed?
Sundus Rasheed describes herself as an occasional writer, a behind the scenes media person and a travel addict. She is responsible for a great team of Radio Jockeys at CityFM89 and their shows and everything that goes into making radio – including music and promotions. “If something goes wrong on air,” she says “I’m the one to blame.” Q: Why did you join Twitter? I joined Twitter when Facebook was banned for a couple of weeks, sometime in May 2010. I felt so disconnected from the rest of world – what people were thinking, what my friends were doing. Twitter proved to be such a melting pot ...
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Video can’t kill the radio star
I was talking to a friend about my favourite means of entertainment and told him I prefer reading books and listening to the radio. To this he said that television and the internet have made the radio obsolete. Despite all my attempts to convince him otherwise, he failed to accept the radio is a mainstream means of entertainment. “How many people listen to the radio these days?” he argued. “About 100? Two hundred, at most?” Though his ignorance astounded me, it made me think: is this really what people think about the radio today? In the early 1950s or so, before the advent ...
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5 things I hate about being single on Valentine’s day
We have all been there. Love is in the air and there’s a flicker of romance in everyone’s eyes but you’ve just gone through a bad breakup and are a member of the ‘loners club’. Your friends excitedly make big plans for D-day. They have already bought new outfits to wear along with gifts for their loved ones. But all you can do is listen with a poker face as they share ideas and ask for advice resisting the need to scream. You begin to hate your newly acquired relationship status for various reasons: 5) Paraphernalia Malls, shops and bookstores are displaying chocolates, teddy bears and ...
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The importance of being heard
“And you’re listening to FM 100… “Aapka apna radio station… “The heartbeat of Pakistan… These tag lines sound familiar to all of us. Because at some point of the day, most probably while driving, we have all tuned into our favourite FM station. Whether you are enjoying the ride back home while listening to music or catching up on breaking news, it is quite common for these teasers to resonate in your car. Over the years, radio channels have saliently impacted our lives -not just for their entertainment value, but in the case of the recently mushroomed FM radio channels, by providing a ...
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Media bias: Upon land almost dry
“Nothing can describe the confusion of thought which I felt when I sunk in water; for tho’ I swam very well, yet I could not deliver my self from waves so as to draw breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me a vast way on towards the shore, and having spent itself, went back, and left me upon land almost dry, but half-dead with the water I took in.” Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe defines a very pertinent human condition. A condition we can sympathize with, but can not fathom. We need not fathom it. Our ...
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Hello [Digital] World
As we celebrate almost two decades of the internet’s presence in Pakistan, intuitively it makes sense to believe that as the consumer in Pakistan gets ‘Digital’ and the technologies mature, there would have been innovations & change of behaviors in the marketing practices of companies. Yet astonishingly despite the fact that the computing grid is now increasingly available all around us via GPRS / EDGE Services, Wireless Broadband, DSL, etc, there is still a parallel and increasingly irrelevant universe which is inhabited by marketers and their agencies still clinging on to practices & notions of a pre-digital world where even ...
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