Op-ed

The team that takes out the pages every day did not and has not come with any kind of baggage.

Two years ago on April 12, 2010, our very first issue came out. The very first issue had no letters to the editor because we didn’t have any in advance. But two years later, I am glad to say that despite being a brand new paper, we have carried genuine letters every day of our publication. Over the past year, while the desk has seen lots of very good people come and go, we have managed to maintain the quality of the editorial pages.

In fact, we keep getting new writers all the time, and that is a sign that the pages are being widely read and appreciated.  Readers will also be surprised – perhaps pleasantly so—to know that the desk has always been staffed (save a week) by an all women-staff, excluding, of course, myself. And most of these young women are relatively inexperienced— or were when they started off, not like the dozens of years of experience that one would find at editorial pages in other newspapers such as Dawn or even The News. In a sense that has perhaps been the pages’ strongest point – that the team of people that takes out the pages every day did not and has not come with any kind of baggage (barring of course myself, who has now been working in op-ed for the past 12 years) – since for most of them it has been their first, or at the most, second job.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2012.