Esteemed guests and participants. Assalamu Alaikum!

As you have been given a sneak peak by Dr. Ruheela Hassan into how important a role news media plays in shaping public opinion and strengthening our society, it is an opportune time to introduce our news portal.

Although there are a lot of media organisations be it electronic, print or online, the idea of starting a news portal came to us only because of three important things:

First of all. The present trend in local news media is to wait for events to turn into news so as to sell that to the public. Yes, I said "sell". That's because crime and violence are mostly read about as far as the consumption of news content is concerned.

So we will be going against the tide by focusing on things like investigative journalism, ambush journalism, data journalism et cetera. There is a dearth of these genres of journalism as far as local media organisations are concerned.

The second important issue that triggered our decision to launch a news portal of this sort is the growing menace of fake news. Whenever we scroll through our Facebook timeline, we see such posts which look like news but are as distant from reality as the earth is from the sky. WhatsApp is also a favourite network of fake news wallas to vent their frustration. And most people turn out to be their accomplices by forwarding their posts without verifying the sources. They don't have the knowledge either to recognize fake news.

We will be ready to counter any such fake news with well researched articles and videos. We have two people in our team who will specifically deal with this menace in a professional way.

And thirdly. Our district lacks a proper media representation. Should our be district be known only because of the turmoil here? We have some young and talented entrepreneurs here. People should know them and get inspired. We have some really beautiful places here. People should know and throng them. And at the same time, we also have some developmental issues that need to be addressed. All these things will be on our radar as well.

On the occassion, I also want to make public the revenue model of our news portal.

The income generating components of our portal include: