WITH the newspaper industry across the world going through tough times, it is gratifying to see a new English daily hitting the newsstands and enlivening the media scene. Pakistan Today , which follows the Express Tribune launched some months earlier, has come at a time when the world of print journalism is in danger of being overshadowed by the WikiLeaks-like revelations on the new media. Even though Pakistan's economy is not fully integrated with the world's financial system, our media has not escaped the adverse effects of the international economic crisis, for advertisement revenues have fallen. The reduction in the number of pages, the rehash of pagination schemes and the shrinkage of the size of the page have meant a regrettable fall in the quantum of news and views for the reader. Of late, there have been redundancies in the electronic media too because the channels' mushroom growth that was characteristic of the first half of this decade has come to a halt. Today, the print medium in Pakistan has to compete with TV and the Internet, with the young ones abandoning grandpa's breakfast table to spend more time on Facebook and Twitter.

Because of a literacy rate that has barely crossed the 50 per cent mark, and the absence of the reading habit, Pakistani newspapers, even those in Urdu, have a low circulation in proportion to the population. The problem gets worse when we realise that the market for English newspapers is already choked. For new ventures to come out under such circumstances is encouraging, for they create jobs for media professionals and add to the reader's choice. We hope our new competitors will uphold the standards of journalism and contribute to the strengthening of press freedom at a time when it is under attack not only from the government but also from non-state actors, the latter life-threatening.