Development News in Print Media of Pakistan: The Case of Urdu and English Press

Abstract

This research was aimed to explore the coverage of development related news in Pakistani print media. To analyze the coverage, two leading newspapers of Pakistan- daily Dawn and daily Jang were selected by the researchers. Both are leading newspapers of Urdu and English language. The study is based on content analysis with a purposive sampling technique. All development news appearing on front, back and inner pages of newspapers were analyzed. The period for selection of news was from November 1st, 2018 to December 31st 2018. In this study, all those news are unit of analysis which deal with the core issue of development in any form. Results indicate that during that period overall 572 news stories appeared in newspapers out of which 271 appeared in Urdu newspapers and 301 appeared in English newspapers. It was explored that most published news was about the infrastructure category of development (20.09%). It was also revealed that the least number of stories (2.75%) appeared on the front pages of the newspapers.  It was found that overall 9.09% news stories were accompanied by images. Results indicate that the English press provided more space to development news than Urdu newspapers.