Dawn (newspaper)

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Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	Dawn Group of Newspapers
Editor	Abbas Nasir
Founded	1941
Headquarters	Haroon House, Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed Road, Saddar, Karachi

Website: www.DAWN.com

Dawn is Pakistan's oldest and most widely-read English-language newspaper. One of Pakistan's two largest English language dailies, it is the flagship of the Dawn Group of Newspapers, published by Pakistan Herald Publications, which also owns the Herald, a magazine, and the evening paper The Star. Pakistan's newspaper of record, it is considered to be something of a Pakistani institution.

It was founded in 1941 by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The newspaper has offices in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, as well as representatives abroad. As of 2004, it has a weekday circulation of over 138,000. The current editor of Dawn is Abbas Nasir.

1 Early history
2 Freedom of expression
3 Famous employees
4 Controversy
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Early history

Founded by Jinnah on October 26, 1941, as a mouthpiece for the Muslim League, Dawn was originally a weekly publication, published in the Indian capital, Delhi. Jinnah summed up the paper's purpose when he stated:

"The Dawn will mirror faithfully the views of Muslim India and the All India Muslim League in all its activities: economic, educational and social and more particularly political, throughout the country fearlessly and independently and while its policy will be, no doubt, mainly to advocate and champion the cause of the Muslims and the policy and programme of the All India Muslim League, it will not neglect the cause and welfare of the peoples of this sub-continent generally".

Dawn became a daily newspaper on October 1942. It won India-wide fame under its first editor, Pothan Joseph. After the creation of Pakistan, the newspaper moved to Karachi, the capital of the newly formed nation state.

[edit] Freedom of expression

Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, Pakistan's first woman columnist, used to write for Dawn until she left due to sexist policies. However, Dawn is now a very progressive and modern newspaper. Under General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan has enjoyed a lively media and relative freedom of the English press.

However, the newspaper often runs a neutral editorial policy and is sometimes careful of overly criticizing the army or religious parties. Despite this, it is sometimes seen as excessively against the policies of the late military dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

In addition, Dawn regularly carries syndicated articles from western newspapers like The Independent, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

In Pakistan Dawn has in-paper magazines such as Sci-tech World, Young World, "Images", "Books & Authors" etc.

On Sundays, the weekend advertiser carries three sections namely "Ad Buzz", "Career" & "Real Estate".

[edit] Famous employees

Pothan JosephFounding editor
Altaf Husain editor.
Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, editorial page columnist.
Ardeshir Cowasjee, editorial page columnist.
Zamir Niazi, sub-editor.
Ayaz Amir, editorial page columnist.
Irfan Husain, editorial page columnist.
Muneeza Shamsie, occasional contributor.
Amar Jaleel, columnist.

[edit] Controversy

During the wake of the Kargil War, the Dawn website (http://www.dawn.com), in 1999, was blocked from access within India by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, a government-owned telecommunications company which at the time had monopoly control of the international Internet gateways in India. Media site Rediff elicited that the ban was instigated by the Indian government, and then published detailed instructions as to how one could bypass the filter and view the site.