Changing rooms

The idea behind Tribune was not to replicate the competition but to be different.

It was September 2009 when I first received a call from someone called Bilal Lakhani who was planning on launching a newspaper.

At that time, I was the editorial pages editor of The News and quite happy with the job as well as my position. I had been there for over three years and had found the organisation a decent place to work at. Of course, having Talat Aslam, a good friend and a thoroughly professional journalist, as the editor of that newspaper helped.

The first time the would-be publisher called, I was driving – ortrying to – on I I Chundrigar Road at rush hour. I had been told that such a call would come but wanted to know the details ofthe planned project and the exact position that was on offer as well as the money I’d be paid. I had figured since I was quite happy with my current position, and that the project was entirely new and hence a risk, it would take a considerable incentive to make me consider switching. The first phone call was a fiasco, one could say, because I was anticipating something specific and that was not forthcoming so I told Bilal, perhaps a bit to his consternation, that I was not interested.

However, to his credit, he persisted and called again. This time he was more specific and following that I also met with Muhammad Ziauddin, a very senior and well-respected journalist who I knew from my days at Dawn and who had come on board as executive editor. He met me and explained that I should seriously consider the offer because it would allow me to build up the editorial pages of a newspaper from scratch, a challenge in itself.

He was right because, prior to this, I had always taken over work in progress, so to speak. Six years were spent at Dawn and there was not much one could do to change things around (in any case, I wasn’t the head of the pages there but rather assisting the editorial pages’ editor). However, at The News, there had been some opportunity to do that.

However, it would be at The Express Tribune where I would have the opportunity, of course after input from the publisher, the executive editor and the editor Kamal Siddiqi who is an old friend and colleague from The News as well as Dawn, to fashion the editorial pages of the new newspaper, and hence its voice, from scratch. I cannot really pass judgment on the quality of the pages because that is something better left to the readers, but I will say that the idea behind them was not to replicate the competition but to be different. But having said that, it can be very, very difficult to find new writers. Of course, this is not to say that some of our writers have not come from other papers or haven’t ever written elsewhere, but the objective was also to uncover new voices and to bring them to our pages for an eclectic and varied debate.

I eventually joined in November 2009 and the launch didn’t happen for another six months. The one good thing that the newspaper did was to invest heavily in training the sub-editors that it had hired, particularly since the bulk had just graduated and had little or no print, or in fact any media, experience. In my section, I had three such sub-editors and our desk became functional in January 2010.

In the sixteen months gone by, I can say with some degree of certainty that, though one or two changes took place with replacements coming in, the quality of the staff has slowly but steadily been established. And while, compared to their counterparts in other newspapers, they may still have considerably less experience, but are by no means less competent at what they are asked to do. With the passage of time, I hope that they will begin to take more charge of the pages and own them increasingly.

As for myself, the one thing that I do regret after joining this newspaper has been the general inability to write under my own byline since, at least in my opinion (and it may sound clichéd but it’s true), a journalist who does not write is like a doctor who does not practice. Other than that, it has been, in retrospect, a move that I don’t regret at all. Just before moving to The Express Tribune, in my last weekly column for The News on Sunday, I wrote an article titled ‘Changing rooms’, which was about the generally transient nature of jobs such as mine and that, for someone like me, it was nothing more than changing rooms – which explained my decision never to keep any personal item at my place of work. Perhaps that may change now.

The writer is Editor, Opinion and Editorial pages.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th,  2011.