Package Deal

In Quetta (pop. 84.000 humans, 20,000 camels), a thriving West Pakistan trade center 536 rugged miles north of Karachi, the crimson pomegranates-cbme big as softballs, and the government train arrives sporadically in a hiss of steam with stale copies of daily newspapers from Karachi and Lahore. These imports enjoy only a languid sale in the bazaar, for Quettans, with a literacy rate of 10.3%, are not the reading sort. Several misguided publishers have tried to give Quetta a daily newspaper of its own; the most successful of these lasted only 18 issues. Quettans get along with a bizarre medley of nine local weeklies (est. combined circulation: under 5,000), which only charity could call newspapers.

Of the nine, eight are printed in Urdu, the other in English. Seven are strictly one-man shows in which the proprietor hustles ads and copy, cribs items from the old newspapers arriving by train, cuts by hand the pothook stencils of the Urdu script. Then he makes the rounds of Quetta's three print shops, pursuing the lowest print rate of the week. Advertisers are rare, since Quettan merchants prefer to do all their pitching over a hookah at the bazaar, so the publisher must seek revenue from other sources. From Baluchistan's maliks (tribal chieftains), the shrewd editor can usually wangle 100 rupees ($21) for a favorable story, e.g., a puff with picture of a chieftain's son who has just passed his university exams.

All this might have endured forever had not West Pakistan's Governor Akhtar Husain paid a visit to Quetta and looked around in vain for a daily paper. For his embarrassed hosts, who laid out Quetta's nine weeklies as a substitute, Husain had a proposal beautiful in its simplicity: "Why not come out on different days of the week so that Quetta has a fresh paper every day?"

With some official encouragement--a government grant of 1,200 rupees a month, plus daily transcripts of Radio Pakistan news--seven of Quetta's publishers agreed to try. Soon they were producing Quetta's first homespun daily, which had seven names: Tanzim (Order), Kohsar (Mountain), Bagh-o-Bahar (Garden in Spring), Qand (Sweetness), Nara-e-Haq (Voice of Truth), Zamana (Times) and Sadaqat (Righteousness). Last week they laid bold plans to float a bigger government loan, hire a pool reporter and three stencil cutters, organize group circulation and sales crews. Observing from afar, Governor Husain sent congratulations: "Bound to create history in the field of journalism." But then, Quetta's weird weeklies had already, in a sense, done that.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.