Jang.com.pk
Like almost all early news websites in Pakistan, www.jang.com.pk was initially meant for providing overseas readers with online access to daily Jang’s digital version. Over the last couple of decades, it has evolved into one of the most trusted Pakistani sources of news updates besides being a major attraction for the readers of blogs, views and analyses about the country’s politics and society.
According to its own claim, the website “attracts nearly 2.6 million unique visitors per month with 40 million page views making it the most popular website of Pakistan.” These numbers have been achieved mostly on the back of major news stories published by daily Jang and opinion columns written for the newspaper by some of the most sought after writers in Pakistani commentariat, but, of late, the website has also attracted many viewers with its quick news updates. It has been breaking news as and when it happens, thanks to a massive network of reporters that Jang and Geo News collectively have across Pakistan.
An added benefit readers have for being on www.jang.com.pk is that it provides them links to some of Pakistan’s leading news sources – including but not limited to daily Jang and Geo News.
The website follows the same editorial policies as the rest of Jang Group publications – a conservative, middle of the road, market-minded approach.
Audience Share
4.22%
Ownership Type
Private
Geographic Coverage
International
Content Type
Free Content
Media Companies / Groups
Jang Group
Ownership Structure
www.jang.com.pk is owned by Independent Newspaper Corporation (Private) Limited. The company’s shareholding structure of 1975 lists Mir Javed Rahman, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and S. Jarrar Hussain as its shareholders, each of them holding 33.33% shares. The most recent ownership structures include debenture holders and the ownership structure is based on those.
Jang Publications (Private) Limited is the largest debenture holder in the company. It possesses 88%debentures, followed by Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman (6.90%), his brother Mir Javed Rahman (5%) and Mansoor Rahman, a business executive at Jang Group, (0.10%).
A vast majority of shares in Jang Publications (Private) Limited, 62.8%, are owned by Combined Investments Limited. The rest of the shares in Jang Publications (Private) Limited are mostly owned by Jang (Private) Limited (29.27%), Mir Javed Rahman (1.36%) and Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman (6.08%).
Combined Investments Limited, on its part, is owned by Mir Javed Rahman (24.34% shares) and Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman (75.35% shares). Jang (Private) Limited, too, is owned by the two brothers who together own all but one of its 223,452 shares.
Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and Mir Javed Rahman control at least 99.90% of shares Independent Newspaper Corporation Private Limited.
Voting Rights
Missing Data
Individual Owner
General Information
Founding Year
1996
Affiliated Interests Founder
The younger of Jang Group’s founder Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman’s two sons, he is generally known as MSR. He has expanded his father’s newspaper publishing business into a multi-billion-rupee media empire over the last four decades – becoming Pakistan’s biggest and the most powerful media tycoon in the process.
Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, who mostly lives in Dubai, is one of the pioneers of online news platforms in Pakistan. Daily Jang became the country’s first newspaper in 1996 to have its internet edition. Since then, this edition has transformed into a fully-fledged news website in Urdu language and has become one of the country’s most browsed online news sources. As of now, almost all news platform owned by Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and his family have their own websites, each with a sizeable audience.
He has shown the same pioneering spirit in television industry and has set up several television channels. These include Pakistan’s most watched Urdu language news channel, Geo News, and the country’s only youth-focused channel, Aag (which closed down after a couple of years of its 2002 launch because it could not earn its keep).
Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman’s first foray into the news industry, soon after he finished his studies back in the late 1970s, was to run an English language evening newspaper, Daily News. He turned it into Karachi’s largest circulating evening newspaper soon after taking over its management.
He has held key positions in All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS), a representative body of print media owners. He has also played a key role in the formation of Pakistan Broadcasters Association (PBA) that represents businesses and individuals running television channels and radio stations in Pakistan.
Unlike his father who mostly stayed away from directly getting involved in politics, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman has never hesitated from taking on political leaders, parties and even governments. In the late 1990s, he had a bruising clash with the then civilian government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif who imposed punishing restrictions on daily Jang and its affiliated publications for their critical coverage of his government. Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and Maleeha Lodhi, who at the time worked as the editor of The News International, and some other members of the Jang Group staff faced treason charges for publishing news and views that Sharif did not like.
In 2007, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman had another run-in with the government, this time for opposing the military-led administration of President General Pervez Musharraf. Consequently, Geo News, a news channel owned by Mir family, was briefly taken off air and one of its senior talk show hosts, Hamid Mir (not related to Mir family), was banned from appearing on television.
Since Musharraf’s ouster from power in 2008, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and his group have publicly backed Nawaz Sharif’s party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) to the extent of earning the wrath of the superior judiciary for news coverage favorable to him. Daily Jang and its associated media outlets have also been highly critical of the military’s interference in politics. This criticism became perilously obvious when GEO News accused the head of a military-led intelligence agency of conspiring to shoot and injure the channel’s star talk show host Hamid Mir in Karachi in April 2014. The group, as a result, has seen the distribution of its newspapers blocked multiple times and the signal of its television channels scrambled disrupted and shuffled on numerous occasions.
Affiliated Interests Ceo
is the Chief Executive Officer of Jang Group. See above for more.
Affiliated Interests Editor-In-Chief
is an Urdu language poet and journalist. Before joining Jang Group, he was associated with Samaa TV, a Karachi-based news channel, and Lahore-based Urdu language daily AajKal (which is no longer published).
Fazil Jamili was twice elected as general secretary of Karachi Union of Journalists and has been a member of the federal executive committee of Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. He has also headed Karachi Press Club’s literary committee for years.
Fazil Jamili was born in 1968 in Pind Khan Khel village near Haripur city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s Hazara division.
Affiliated Interests other important people
the elder brother of Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and is serving as the chairman of Jang Group. He does not deal with the day to day running of the group’s media outlet and has little to no say over their financial affairs. He does not have his own children but has adopted one of Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman’s many children.
He is a managing director at Jang Group and has been associated with it since 1993.He has served as the president of the All Pakistan Newspaper Society, an association of print media owners, in 2015-17. He also worked as the secretary general of the same association in 2012-14 and, before that, remained president of the Marketing Association of Pakistan for three terms.
is the group managing director at Jang Group and has been associated with it for more than two decades. He has served as the group’s executive editor also. Before joining the Jang Group, he founded Financial Post, an English language business daily that no longer publishes and, before that, worked as the executive assistant to Hameed Haroon, Chief Executive Officer of Pakistan Herald Publications Limited that owns English language daily newspaper.
Contact
Printing House
Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar Road, Karachi
Tel.: +92-(0)21-32637111-19
Fax: +92(0)21-32636066
Email: faziljamili@gmail.com
Website : jang.com.pk
Financial Information
Revenue (in Mill. $)
USD 54.36 Million / PKR 4.28 Billion (2008-09)
Operating Profit (in Mill. $)
USD 4.03 Million / PKR 318 Million (2008-09)
Advertising (in % of total funding)
USD 0.039 Million / PKR 3.1 Billion (72.43%) (2008-09)
Market Share
Missing Data
Further Information
Meta Data
The outlet was sent information request on 14 January 2019 through a courier company as well as by email. It did not respond even after a reminder was couriered on 1st February 2019 and emailed on 4 February 2019. No verified online information is available about its ownership structure and its financial status.
Financial information for this outlet profile has been obtained from a report that Independent Newspapers Corporation (Private) Limited submitted to the SECP about financial year that started on1stJuly 2008 and ended on June 30, 2009.
The revenues and profit mentioned above also pertain to the whole of Independent Newspapers Corporation (Private) Limited (which also owns some other news publications) and not to www.jang.com.pk.
