Jang
Daily Jang was first published during World War II – hence its name which means ‘war’ in Urdu. It was originally published as a weekly, mainly to raise political awareness among Muslims living in British India.
After Pakistan’s creation in 1947, a young Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman became one of the pioneers of newspaper publishing in the new country’s initial capital city, Karachi.
Since the start of its publication in Pakistan, daily Jang has been a conservative, middle of the road, market-minded newspaper. Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman shunned colour printing, flashy layouts and new technologies as much as he would stayaway from being directly involved in political controversies.
His son, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, has been the real force for changein Pakistani news industry since the 1980s. He not just started multiple editions of daily Jang from cities outside its headquarters in Karachi, including one from London, he also launched many other news platforms. Along the way, he also got entangled in various political conflicts.
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 Nawaz 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, the news channel owned by Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and his family, was briefly taken off air and one of its senior talk show hosts, Hamid Mir, was banned from appearing on television.
Since Pervez Musharraf’s ouster from power in 2008, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and his media group havepublicly 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, including Geo News, have also been highly critical of the military’s and the judiciary’s alleged interference in politics.Prime Minister Imran Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, too, have often faced scathing criticism from news outlets owned by Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and his family.
Their confrontational approach towards the military surfaced in the public most glaringly when they accused the head of a military-led intelligence agency of conspiring to shoot and injureHamid Mir in Karachi in April 2016. Jang Group, as a result, has seen the distribution of its newspapers blocked multiple times and the signal of television channels associated with its sister concern, Geo Television Network, scrambled, disrupted and shuffled on numerous occasions.
Audience Share
27%
Ownership Type
Private
Geographic Coverage
National
Content Type
Paid Content (PKR 20)
Media Companies / Groups
Jang Group
Ownership Structure
Daily Jang 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
1939
Affiliated Interests Founder
was born in 1927 in Gujranwala, a city about 50 kilometers north of Lahore, but his parents shifted to Delhi at the start of World War II. He started Jang as a cyclostyled weekly newspaper in Delhi when he was a student there. He would report the entire contents of the newspaper all by himself, before producing and selling it also on his own. By the time Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947, he was already known among Delhi’s Muslims as a publisher/editor who supported the creation of the new state as a homeland for Muslims living in British India.
Soon after Pakistan’s creation, Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman started publishing Jang as a daily newspaper from Karachi and found a ready audience among the city’s migrant communities who had left their homes in and around Delhi to settle in the new state.
In 1962, Mir Khalil-ur-Rahmanestablished Daily News, an English language evening newspaper published from Karachi. In 1967, he founded Akhbar-e-Jahan which has become the largest circulating Urdu-language current affairs weekly in Pakistan. He was also the founder of MAG, an English language current affairs weekly published from Karachi since the early 1980s.
Today, his sons Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and Mir Javed Rahman run the operations of these publications as well as those of a few television channels and some news websites under the banner of Jang Group.
Affiliated Interests Ceo
The younger of Jang Group’s founderMir 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 Editor-In-Chief
The Editor-in-Chief of daily Jang. See above for more.
Affiliated Interests other important people
the elder brother of Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, is serving as the chairman of Jang Group. He does not deal with the day to day running of the group’s media outletsandhas 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 sons.
He has been associated with Jang Group since 1993 and is working as its managing director. He has served as the president ofAll Pakistan Newspaper Society, an association of print media owners, in 2015-17 and as its secretary generalin 2012-14.Before that, he remained the president ofMarketing Association of Pakistan, a trade body, for three terms.
He 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 Jang Group, he founded Financial Post, an English language business daily that is no longer published and, before that, worked as the executive assistant to Hameed Haroon, chief executive officer of Pakistan Herald Publications Limited that owns English language daily Dawn.
Contact
Printing House
Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar Road, Karachi
Tel.: +92-(0)21-32637111-19
Fax: +92(0)21-32636066
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 daily Jang’s 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 on 1stJuly 2008 and ended on 30 June, 2009.
The revenues and profit mentioned above also pertain to the whole of Independent Newspapers Corporation (Private) Limited (which owns some other news publications as well) and not to dailyJang alone.