Is it over?
Note: This opinion was originally written for a newspaper; however, unfortunately, as stated in the forthcoming text, newspapers nowadays are meek given the “legal mousetraps and commercial honeytraps.”
kyuuN nah chiikhuuN kih yaad karte haiN
miri aavaaz gar nahiiN aatii
Why would I not scream because I am remembered
Only when my voice is not heard
— Ghalib (translated by Anjum & Basole)
A while back, an op-ed by a budding lawyer emerged. While speaking of the op-ed in itself, it is more a lamentation than a discourse, and can be placed at the lower end of the spectrum of virtuous op-eds that I fleshed out by stating the criteria of thrilling op-eds in these pages (see: How not to write an op-ed, January 02, 2026).
What is utterly surprising is that, despite employing bland language—without explicitly mentioning widely used terms like “deep state,” “establishment,” or “elite,” and without providing a critical analysis from a political economy or class perspective—it relied instead on a hierarchy of age, offering no real discourse or findings, just a series of statements piled upon statements, according to the e-paper version on the newspaper’s site. Yet, it was taken down. This is unusual, even when critiques in these pages, and elsewhere, were vitriolic in both form and content.
Ofcourse, there is a precarious legal DNA lingering beneath this, especially given PECA with its amendments, that lawyers often attribute to the axing of dissent by fomenting undefined offences—“fake” or “false” information, bans on “aspersions” against the state, and so on. Still, that does not seem to be the prime offender in the defenestration of a youth’s voice (read: din), as it is an undeniable fact that anglophone newspapers, due to limited access to the language and declining attention spans, are not read widely anyway, though in this case it was fanned by vloggers; and similarly, pressures, if any, are likely to be inflicted on other papers too or even the same paper in the past. Ergo, the case for outright censorship alone doesn’t paint the whole picture. Rather, it appears, as the adage goes, “it’s always economics, stupid,” that the archaic business model of newspapers—by reinforcing the legal toolkit—allowed that unpublishing to happen and may, we hope not, lead to many more such actions in the future.
Three decades ago, when media scholars debated the future of print, it was an academic exercise. No one in those seminar rooms imagined the newspaper, that proud “first draft of history,” would one day be fighting for its own survival. And lo and behold, in Pakistan today, that survival is the central question. Across the country, pages are shrinking, editions are closing, and newsrooms are thinning out. The decline is not just visible, it is measurable, structural, and now accelerating. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ data shows that the number of newspapers and periodicals fell from 749 in 2011 to 707 in 2019. At the provincial level, the picture is even starker. Punjab’s publications dropped from 102 to just 42, and Sindh’s from 44 to a mere 5. Only KP and Balochistan saw increases—ironically, the two provinces with far smaller advertising markets.
What changed? Inflation, collapsing advertising, rising newsprint costs, and the shift to digital platforms all played their part. A newspaper competes not only with another newspaper but with a free Facebook feed, a free YouTube clip, and a free TikTok reel. Classifieds, once the lifeblood of Urdu papers, migrated online. Corporate ads followed global trends and moved to Meta, Google/Youtube, and TikTok, which together captured nearly 90% of Pakistan’s digital advertising spend. Per PACRA, digital alone commands PKR 35.8 billion (31%) of the country’s PKR 114.6 billion advertising market, growing at 26.5%, following TV. On the other hand, print crawls at just over 15% of the total market. This makes sense, as advertisers now overwhelmingly prefer platforms that offer real-time metrics, micro-targeting, and 24/7 visibility.
When advertising, the lifeline of any newspaper, moves away, a double whammy follows: pages must shrink, and dependence on government advertising increases. As state advertising becomes a larger share of print revenue, political influence deepens. Covert pressure, overt threats, self-censorship, and selective silence all contribute to a credibility deficit. Meanwhile, viral visual content on social media, often unreliable, outpaced print in shaping public opinion. As a result, the raison d’être of the newspaper—mass literacy, including dissent where needed—has been steadily eroded.
The problem is not just commercial; it is also conceptual. Pakistan’s print media never fully adapted its product. Newspapers remain heavily textual, statement-based, and reliant on a bureaucratese that demands a higher level of linguistic mastery than the average reader possesses. They did not redesign layouts, shorten formats, increase visuals, or create interactive elements the way global newspapers did. Nor did they invest meaningfully in investigative journalism, which is expensive, risky, and difficult to monetize. Ipso facto, in rural areas a newspaper remains a luxury item, and in cities it is increasingly a nostalgic artifact.
The decline is not uniquely Pakistani. India’s print readership has been falling since 2017, triggering job cuts, newsroom downsizing, and a digital-first shift. Globally, the story is similar: declining circulation, thinning print editions, closure of local papers, and consolidation by corporate owners. Smaller regional papers have suffered the most, leaving communities dependent on digital sources that often lack editorial gatekeeping.
Notwithstanding, this global pattern, Pakistan’s challenge is, in some ways, sharper. The country is not merely facing digital disruption; it is confronting digital disruption in a low-literacy market where print never achieved mass penetration in the first place. English-language newspapers-maintained quality but never scaled, while Urdu newspapers scaled but never transformed.
The question, therefore, is not whether newspapers will survive in print--Is it over? No, they likely will, albeit selectively, survive but whether Pakistani newspapers can rebuild their franchise in the digital era. This is crucial not only for their survival and for mass literacy, but also for reducing dependence on government advertising and gaining greater editorial autonomy to say what needs to be said, notwithstanding legal mousetraps and commercial honeytraps.
Furqan Ali: The writer is the co-founder of the Policy Club, the co-founder of the Dead Poets Society of Pakistan, a Peshawar-based researcher, and a sporadic writer of fiction and poetry.