The quality of the technology related journalism in the local press has been questionable for obvious reasons. Having a number of good friends in many local media outfits, I can say with confidence that none of them have any dedicated technology reporters or journalists. This excludes those who actually work for technology magazines like Spider and Netmag. This lack of technology reporters results in reports that are poor at best and grossly incorrect at worst.
Consider, for example, this news item in today’s The News International. The report starts off with an incorrect title – calling MNP a PTCL issue rather than a PTA issue. That is not all, the report actually presents the scenario as if the MNP thing was some wire that suddenly got snapped and ‘has failed’. Using the words fail or failed repeatedly, the reports gives an impression as if the failure has been officially concluded by someone and that the feature is about to be taken back.
Quite misleading if you see how some of the companies are actively using MNP to their advantage.
A better reporting would have shed lights on both success and problems of MNP and would have talked about as to how the unawareness amongst the subscribers and incorrect or unavailable subscriber documentation are major problems in wide adoption of MNP.
Tee Emm on Pakistan Next Gen Issues 
November 2, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Glad to know that there are reporters like me who can’t differentiate between pta and ptcl and frankly speaking it’s not their fault either. Normally we hear a lot about PTCL then PTC so things get mixed up.
as far tech news in local papers. I ain’t sure about quality of info present in english papers but Imran Laari does good job to write stuff about techie things but sometimes he also gives old news or maybe Jang paper publish it so late that things become outdated. For instance Imran once wrote an article about Youtube that Google would be going to acquire it. By the time article published, google had acquired Youtube. Maybe Youtube guys would already have taken burp after enjoying great meal from 1.6 billion dollars. I knew it so I catched it. God knows how many wrong news are published in local news papers.(Allah Maafi). 🙂
November 3, 2007 at 8:03 am
Actually I don’t think the techy papers are any better. Just take a look at the byteback section of dawn’s sci-tech world. Basically its the area where emails from readers seeking advice on their computer problems are published. Just go through some of the answers and you’ll see!
November 26, 2007 at 11:51 am
I agree totally. While we have an okay competency in PC Tech any technical reporting related to infrastructure at the Enterprise or Service Provider level is missing. Not only that even in PC Tech the competency does not go to the expert level. The problem here is that in Journals like Spyder etc fail to make a community form where they can identify relevant experts. I owned and moderated a 4000 person Pakistan Gaming Community at one time and the level of technical expertise was stunning among the members. I had people who could write 3 pages on cooling systems for shuttle systems or give a technical analysis of signal responses on current monitors. But such people will never make it to Spyder who work with a very silo “we know what we are doing” mentality.
January 9, 2008 at 4:10 pm
@Habib…did you ever try getting in touch with Spyder recently? If not then you should not go around labeling them, without knowing
April 23, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I prefer Digg to Spider since Spider comes after a month and have stale info.