ARE newspaper publishing firms at the mercy of over-mighty corporations that intervene in the perspective and reportage of South Asian newspapers? Is this intervention a decided sign of the times to come, especially with respect to the future of newspapers? And does the rise of the institution of editor-manager, in particular in India, signify an irreversible trend?

These are questions which have aroused serious concern (as indeed such questions must) in the minds of professional editors and journalists, and of equity holders and newspaper managements of the large media conglomerates that service the subcontinent’s increasingly literate classes. The answers that such questions evoke are relevant not merely in a theoretical sense, but are critical to the future of bias-free information processing as a primary component in our rapidly expanding global village.

At the onset, I would like to clarify a few misconceptions about the subject. First of all let me state emphatically that the institution of editor-manager is not an entirely new one. It developed as a result of a process that first spawned the institution of the owner-editor at the turn of the last century. The evolution of this new form of corporate management was understandable in a situation where pen-wielding journalists took up the nationalist cause and hurled invective at a colonial administration – all this at a time when they were conscious of a participation in a burgeoning literary and political renaissance, so recently fuelled by the spread of liberal western ideals in the Indian political mind.

The depiction of The Sentinel and its owner-editor Bhupati, so lovingly etched out by film director Satyajit Ray in his early sixties masterpiece Charulata (The Unfaithful Wife), corresponds closely to the above image. We are never told the source of Bhupati’s holdings, although allusions to his family’s distinguished public career and finite source of wealth appear frequently in the course of the film. It does, however, depict the new owner-editor as the scion of a respectable Bengali bourgeois family, aflame with the ideals of English liberal democracy but, unfortunately, hopelessly incompetent at financial administration. Bhupati therefore emerges as a natural victim of embezzlement at the hands of his unscrupulous brother-in-law, the lowly placed press manager, whose theft of newsprint purchase funds causes the bankruptcy and closure of The Sentinel.

Here, too, in Ray’s film we encounter some of the earliest examples of nepotistically appointed staffers. In addition to an acquisitive brother-in-law, there is also a cousin of Bhupati’s, fresh out of college, who acts as a leader writer and columnist at discreetly low wages. Last but not least there is Charu, his unfaithful wife and future collaborator, who finally decides to embark on an emotional entanglement and a journalistic career after successfully wowing Bengali literary audiences with a short memoir in Bengal’s top selling literary journal.

 

The classic components of the control exercised by the owner-editor during the heart of the Raj epoch – the solid bourgeois credentials and thus the business vision of the owner-editor, his continuing flirtation with western liberalism, a paucity of financial management skills, the presence or even the domination of irregularly appointed staffers, and finally – bankruptcy as an incurable termination point for the firm itself are all faithfully depicted in Ray’s cinematic classic. And many owner-editors in the last decades of the Raj such as Moulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar who published The Comrade in Delhi, Shaikh Abdul Majid Sindhi who was provided a partnership by my grandfather Haji Abdoola Haroon in Al Waheed in Karachi, Moulana Zafar Ali Khan with Zamindar in Lahore and Hameed Nizami in Lahore’s weekly Nawa-e-Waqt stand testimony to the proliferation of owner-editors across the subcontinent. I am sure that my friends in India and Bangladesh could provide numerous other examples that testify to the prevalence of this institution in the same period in their own territories.

 

By the mid 1940s a new level of corporatisation in the newspaper publishing firm had already appeared on the horizon. Mr. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in his capacity as the steward of media interests in the All India Muslim League, controlled the Delhi-based Dawn’s policy, but appointed a professional editor – first Pothan Joseph (previously of the Indian Express) and then Altaf Hussain from Sylhet to the editorship of the newspaper. It was one of the many signs that change had begun to transform a market till now controlled largely by owner-editor managed firms in undivided India to one that would be increasingly dominated by professional editors.

This is not to state that professional editors had been largely absent before. The two giant newspapers, The Times of India and The Indian Express in Bombay, had long been dominated by a string of professional editors as was The Civil Military Gazette in Lahore and The Statesman in Calcutta. When Mr. Mohammad Ali Jinnah founded Dawn in Karachi for my family, the appointment of a professional editor, Altaf Hussain, who had previously served at the same post in Delhi, ensured the intellectual and ideological continuity of this institution in Pakistan. Similarly in the pro-Congress Progressive Papers Limited in Lahore, despite the presence of a dynamic, influential and erudite owner – Mian Iftikharuddin – the firm opted for professional editors in both the Pakistan Times and the Urdu daily Imroze. Influential figures such as the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the feisty radical aristocrat Mazhar Ali Khan served as professional editors in the institution, as did the venerable Ahmed Ali Khan who eventually returned to Dawn to serve as its professional editor for a record period of almost thirty years over two terms.

 

For the next four decades the newspaper industry witnessed the coexistence of both owner-editors and professional editors. In the often bitter wars and trade union activism that plagued Pakistani newspaper establishments during this period, much invective was hurled by detractors of both organisational forms of newspaper control against each other. Part of the explanation lies in the anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and even anti-capitalist bias of the journalist trade unions of the time. When the military dictator President Ayub Khan in the 1960s launched his attacks on three basic freedoms – the freedom of expression, the freedom of association and the freedom of press – through a series of specially drafted ordinances, the draconian Press and Publications Ordinance was created exclusively to muzzle the press.

A further Working Journalists (Condition of Service) Act was passed in the same period and militant trade unionism by journalists focused on targeting newspaper managements and owners in their effort to improve wages and working conditions in the newsroom. The failure of journalists’ unions in effecting changes in compensation and in tenure of service would result in serious repercussions in the 1970s, when a new act – the Newspaper Employees Conditions of Service Act (1973) was passed, lumping journalists, press workers and office workers in the industry into one grand trade union in every newspaper establishment to effectively serve as the collective bargaining agent. This development would eventually pose a major hazard to the survival of quality journalism, an aspect which in itself would lead to a weakening of the demand for professional editors. Professional standards for journalism would take a back seat to the intensifying economism of the trade union agenda.

 

The institution of professional editor within the newspaper publishing firm led to a dualism, which almost assumed the status of a moral precept within the context of freedom of expression. This institution sought to establish a presumption of quality distinctiveness with respect to the work of the professional editor. The argument ran thus: professional editors were able to concentrate fully on the various editorial aspects of a newspaper. This specialisation imparted a degree of skill not possible in the institution of a mere owner-editor. Its proponents argued further that although the institution of owner-editor may have been historically a necessary development at an early stage, it had now lost its vigour due to the principle of conferring the post of editor in accordance with the laws of inheritance. Selection by birth, it was argued, could not exceed the efficacy of the merit principle. Hence, newspapers governed by the institution of owner-editor were believed to be subject to the inevitable degeneration of candidatures associated with the inheritance principle.

 

Also explicitly brought out was the criterion of a conflict of interest. The structure of professional editorship implied a clear dualism where news was the domain of the professional editor, and revenue and expenditures that of the newspaper management. This dualism in effect led to the principle of insulation which is best described as follows: the formulation of news is the work of the professional editor, while managerial decision-making is best conducted in an environment divorced of any possibility of influencing the news content of newspapers. Therefore, the impartial formulation and analysis of the news assumes a sanctity since it is untouched by commercial considerations.

This sanctification does not take into account the probability of publishers or managers bearing influence on the choice of an editor, or indeed of the day to day interchange of interactive decision-making between managements and editors that must of necessity ensue in all firms. It also does not account for the proliferation of managerial skills in the art of modern newsroom management, both factors displaying a tendency to dilute the monolithic purity and separateness of the news and management as separate decision-making areas of a newspaper publishing firm.

Some of the above contradictions are removed in the newly emerging institution of editor-managers, an institution which is becoming prevalent particularly in India, but also shows signs of entering the Pakistan media scene. With respect to this institution, the principle of insulation is wholly rejected in favour of the need for consistency in decision-making. The argument runs thus: the dualism resulting from the institution of professional editors as distinct from newspaper managements led to an insulation of functions between the two that put the firm at cross-purposes between two different forces pulling in opposing directions. Insulation was believed to imply the existence of contradiction, and thus seen as an absence of harmony within the social vision of the firm as conceived by its top decision-makers, whether they be editorial staffers or managers. And the absence of harmony in the newspaper firm clearly implied a loss of competitive edge and perhaps even a significant waste of resources.

 

The justification for this newly emerged institution of editor-manager thus runs something like this: the institution of owner-editor failed because the principle of inheritance could not ensure a meritorious selection in the role of editor. In the process of selection today for an editor based on merit, the possession of newsroom management skills is considered essential. By inference, such skills presuppose the existence of a high level of general manage rial skills, thus resulting in the relatively harmonious (and cost-effective) choice of an editor-manager. The obvious fallacy in this argument is that it denies any relevance to the principle of insulation – that near sacred precept which assures the existence of a judicious impartiality in the mind of the editor, whereby ‘without fear or favour’ the editor can make a decision without modifying it to take into account the sentiments of overmighty corporations and advertisers. I would argue that the loss of this insulation in the newly emerging structure that encapsulates the function of the editor-manager is critical and the absence of the institution of professional editor is expected to negatively impact on the survival prospects for an independent press in South Asia.

 

I have been asked by Seminar magnate Malvika Singh to characterise the salient features of the newspaper that I publish in Pakistan – the Dawn – and to further demonstrate how the newspaper’s decision-making structures influence both policy-making and operational decisions. I shall do this in an attempt to demonstrate that the dualism mentioned in the earlier part of this article is not necessarily a precursor for inefficiency. It may in fact represent a reaffirmation of the positive benefits that the existence of a dualistic system affords to press freedoms and to autonomous reportage in the South Asian newspaper firm. This dualistic system is the single most important buffer between an impartial recounting of the events of the day, and the multifaceted forms of news manipulation that the corporate sector is likely to attempt in its daily odyssey to influence the news.

Dawn was first founded in 1942 in Delhi by Mr. Mohammad Ali Jinnah as the voice of the All India Muslim League. The Dawn that you see in Karachi today was founded five years later. Its first daily edition came out on 15th August 1947, where it reported on the activities of the first day of independent government in the newly founded state of Pakistan. The intellectual and historical continuity between the two Dawns was underlined not only by the common identity of their founder, but also by the exodus of a large number of Dawn journalists from the Delhi newspaper to the Karachi one. The most prominent of them, Altaf Hussain, left his post at Delhi as editor to take up his career as the editor of the Karachi newspaper in the capital city of the newly carved state of Pakistan. Some of the hardy Pakhtoon machine-men who had been printing The Times of India in Bombay also left to join Dawn in Karachi. For a fortnight Dawn Karachi and Dawn Delhi continued to be published simultaneously. Then Dawn in Delhi was unceremoniously burnt down by the Jan Sangh, and the Karachi newspaper (owned by Pakistan Herald Limited) was the only Dawn that remained.

 

Moral and intellectual continuity apart, Dawn became closely identified with the views and persona of the father of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. This acerbic and intensely private leader, averse to any publicity or an invasion of his privacy, was renowned for his decorum in all matters significant. Fortunately for the newspaper that I publish, this did not prevent him from posing with a copy of Dawn on his last birthday – 25 December 1947. Since Mr. Jinnah had never endorsed a product during his professional and public career (apart from Pakistan itself), his affectionate endorsement of the Karachi Dawn was to provide a lasting image of the intimate bond that existed between the father of the nation and the newspaper he founded in Karachi. This intimacy has stood Dawn in good moral and commercial stead, as the newspaper is now viewed as enjoying the unequivocal endorsement of Pakistan’s founding fathers who have metaphorically speaking left Dawn behind as a legacy to the nation. Whatever the merits of this belief, keeping this legacy alive is critical to the continued success, not to mention the aura that surrounds Dawn in Pakistan to this day.

Thus an almost sacred bond is said to exist between the founding fathers of Pakistan and Dawn. The bond contains within it many of the principles, perhaps a trifle old-fashioned, that Bhupati had fought for in Ray’s Charulata. In a tradition transmitted from the Delhi-based Dawn, which was the intellectual and historical (though not corporate) precursor of the Karachi newspaper, it appears that two important implications existed for decision-makers in the Karachi based newspaper. The first was the tradition of a working operational autonomy for whomsoever would be appointed as the editor of Dawn. The second tradition derived from the worldview that determined Dawn’s policy stance. Simply put, this worldview consisted of a commitment to the rational expression of truth, the development of a largely balanced and moderate policy in the political sense, and a continuing dialogue rather than a pronounced hostility between the newspaper and the government of the day.

 

This last facet of an ongoing dialogue between government and the newspaper sometimes imparts what many consider to be a pro-establishment air to Dawn. All newspapers are imbued with a special character. The character of Dawn does not consist of throwing down a gauntlet before the government on a daily basis, or challenging its right to rule. Instead the style of Dawn is to advocate in moderate terms different policy options that confront a Pakistani government today and to gently insist on the superior option whensoever it is believed to exist. This stance appears gentle, but is irreversibly obstinate when it comes to the bottom line. Dawn may state its views minimally and moderately, but once it draws the line on an issue that line becomes irreversible. There are thus clear limits which involve civil rights and freedoms that Dawn may not surrender without permanently damaging its own reputation.

A seemingly middle-of-the-road approach evaluating the benefits of political transformation or indeed of evolution in the new state is coupled with a near-radical advocacy on social causes within the columns of Dawn. Not perhaps as radical as Mian Iftikharuddin’s own views as expressed in the 1950s in his Pakistan Times from Lahore, but certainly a viewpoint that leans heavily towards an imperative for social progress and an almost Fabian-style reform tendency. There are also a host of influences that many Indians would recognise as a presumption in favour of non-alignment, or neutralism, a clear role for the public sector, and often the proverbial American left-winger’s mistrust of the corporate sector.

 

This almost Nehruvian way of thinking captures some of the mindset of the founding fathers of this country, and shares much in common with the thinking of the post-independence founding fathers in neighbouring India itself. Certain parts of this editorial doctrine are perhaps obsolete today and even old fashioned, but despite the fact that almost two-thirds of the Dawn’s readers are under 38 years old, this positioning has continued, and not without a reasonable measure of success.

The reason I have stated Dawn’s vantage position with respect to policy is that in order to demonstrate editorial autonomy, a newspaper needs to be possessed of a distinctive world view on the basis of which a special bond is established between the reader and the newspaper. And such a proselytizing bond has never failed to work in Dawn’s favour. Whether it was in waiting for over four decades after independence for the paper to be permitted by the government to be published in Lahore, or an additional five years again before Dawn could make its appearance in the capital city of Islamabad, the newspaper has emerged as the market leader in each territory in Pakistan from where it has been published.

Doubtless the magic of Mr. Jinnah’s hands clasping the paper on his final birthday in 1947 – in the manner that the dying father of a nation would be envisaged as holding out for all and sundry his last will and testament – helps. Yes, that magic has certainly worked. But equally important has been a commitment by Dawn to a balanced and rational viewpoint and to a perspective that abhors obscurantism and seeks the rational. These are not mere words of rhetoric, but act as effective restraints on policy when you consider that Pakistan’s body politic has been besieged by flag bearers of particularly obscurantist and immoderate ideologies, and the nation itself has been tightly held in the ironclad grip of military domination.

 

The twin traditions of working autonomy for Dawn’s editors and the custodianship of an old fashioned but moderate libertarian view point lie within the precincts of the sanctum sanctorum of Dawn’s decision-making. But how precisely does the implied tradition of working autonomy for the editor translate into institutional practice? First, setting general policy parameters is the prerogative of Dawn’s publisher/manager who may be an owner or the professional nominee of the equity holders of the firm.

Second, the editor will be selected by the publisher/manager on the basis of his overall competence, perceived integrity, commitment to a balanced and moderate perspective and finally, a reluctance to maintain a high public profile (viewed by many as not being in consonance with the spirit of Dawn). An additional caveat implies that if perchance the editor of Dawn is to be appointed from the owning family (and this has happened only once in the mid-60s), he may not hold a managerial post simultaneously or be directly governed by the demands of equity holders. In fact a prerequisite for holding a post in Dawn even on the managerial side requires a relinquishment of all government office.

It was with this tradition in mind, for example, that my uncle Mahmoud Abdullah Haroon resigned from all posts of responsibility including the Board of Directors of Dawn when he joined President Zia ul Haq’s government as the Minister for Interior, Religious Affairs and Inter Provincial Coordination in the late seventies. This was repeated when he served as Governor of Sindh in the eighties and the early nineties. This tradition of disassociation from Dawn by a major shareholder at the time of holding public office is viewed as essential, since members of the original owning family enjoy an active record of participation in both politics and public affairs.

 

Third, all managerial duties and management itself are to be largely insulated from the office of editor. The editor may be apprised by key management personnel of essential factors governing the sales of his paper, but no staffer on the editorial side will be assigned any revenue-linked responsibilities. Thus editorial staffers may not interact with management on matters concerning specific advertising or circulation revenue concerns. Even in the matter of Special Reports that are commissioned by Dawn’s marketing department, no journalist writing for the report will interface on the travails of making up an advertisement tally alongside the editorial columns.

Fourth, given government is the single largest advertiser in Pakistan, government advertising revenue as a percentage of total revenue is not encouraged to grow beyond an approximate 9 to 11 per cent of advertising spend. It is firmly believed by all senior management personnel that a dependence on government revenues beyond this point poses a real danger for editorial independence, particularly on government issues, and also entails a near impossible effort if advertising cuts ordered by a government need to be countered in restructuring cash flows for the firm.

 

Fifth, if any major advertiser aside from the government attempts to use advertising or newspaper purchases as a vantage point to unethically attempt to influence news reportage in Dawn, the advertisement of such advertisers shall be refused by Dawn, and shall no longer be allowed to constitute part of its commercial revenue.

Sixth, the publisher and editor of Dawn shall not appear together before any governmental authority since any one of them should be deemed sufficient for discussing matters of policy. In general editors are responsible for the micro implementation of specific policies and will tackle government directly on such matters when necessary.

Seventh, the publisher/manager shall, except in unusual circumstances, accept an editor’s recommendations for the appointment of journalists, who after appointment shall report only to the editor. All journalists, however, shall be bound by company rules and regulations.

Eighth, no journalist will be individually invited by the government or any corporation to perform any task or visit any place. All such invitations shall be addressed to the editor who possesses the sole right to decide which journalists shall be allocated to perform such tasks.

Ninth, all editors will receive the highest protocol within the organisation. Any complaints by the public with respect to coverage by the newspaper shall be referred to the editor who shall be competent to dispose off such complaint. The publisher/manager may intervene in the process to discuss the matter with the editor if he feels such public complaint has not been adequately addressed by the editor.

Tenth, no news story will be reviewed or be made available to the publisher/manager until it is published in the newspaper. The publisher will review the contents of the newspaper only after it has been printed, and not before – a post-mortem rather than an ante-mortem evaluation of the news. With this in mind, no publisher/manager will even walk into the newsroom if journalists are at work on the next day’s edition.

The above ten characteristics of Dawn’s system of working a genuine and far-reaching operational autonomy for editors has paid major dividends. It has not prevented – indeed many including myself believe it has helped – the newspaper from progressing in an unprecedented manner through the last six decades since independence. Dawn has witnessed remarkable growth in the last fifteen years and is poised to increase its share of news gathering from the South Asian region. These principles of editorial autonomy have helped keep the overmighty corporation (and government) at bay.

 

However, it is clear that it is dualism, i.e. the separation of the function of ‘editorial and management’, that has constructed the matrix that enables the rapid growth of Dawn to take place. This has been largely ended by an unbridled aggression on the marketing side and an undiluted moderation on the side of newspaper reportage. Such a dualism provides the necessary insulation for the fostering and growth of editorial autonomy within Dawn. It is a system that serves to appease the Unfaithful Wife as vigilantly as Bhupati does at the end of Ray’s Charulata. But it is also a system that is designed to keep the Unfaithful Advertiser at bay and prevent him from an unholy influencing of reportage and comment. Such a preventive practice can seldom be said to conform perfectly to an ideal. But if we endeavour to ensure that departures from the ideal are neither frequent nor remarkable, then we can continue to approximate towards the same ideal with whatever strength we are able to muster.

 

Which brings us to the last point. Does the institution of editor/manager portend well for the future of South-Asian firms? My personal belief is that this new institution which has yet to catch on fully in Pakistan will not serve to insulate editors effectively from the day to day demands of business. It is too early to predict whether the trend towards the establishment of the new institution is as yet reversible. Ostensibly this trend seeks to replace the professional editor with the institution of editor-manager. Its success rests on the assumption that competent editors will better shoulder the functions of publisher/manager than the existing dualism allows, i.e. competent editor-managers will serve a publishing firm better than owner-editors have done. My problem is with the missing insulation and the consequently damaged worldview of an independent newspaper. How this will be replaced within the South Asian publishing firm led by an ambitious editor-manager is anybody’s guess.

 

* The author may be reached at ceo@dawn.com