Pakistan is one of the largest emerging cellular phone markets of the world with the abundance of professionals and growing number of users, depicting a stable economic growth of the country.
This was stated by the Managing Director of the Portsmouth Group, Eileen Walis at two-day media training workshop organised by Mobilink in Turkey, Istanbul, on November 6 and 7. The workshop was attended by over two dozens of mediamen from Pakistan. On the occasion, representatives of Mobilink including Public Relation Officer (PRO) Amir Pasha, PR Manager, Omer Munzoor and Mumbashir were also present.
She said that telecom sector tended to occupy a large proportion of the GDP in the emerging markets, adding that privatisation and reforms were the key issues appearing in the media.
Pakistan may go fast with world's established economies with the help of telecom, which at the same time also acted as a "catalyst" to enable the growth of other industry sectors, she said.
In addition, the human resources development and skill transfer also help the economy thrive, she said. She elaborated that in the emerging markets acquiring customers was more important and critical than providing them with better services, while the media was required to monitor closely that what the providers were offering to their customers. She said that media should be balanced in approach as all service providers following their own agenda while understanding the role of a regulator was important for it.
Eileen observed that landline telephone companies were on a gradual decline for not providing services to the customers in the far-flung mountainous or desert regions. Therefore, GSM is the dominant technology for comprehensive market coverage, pre-paid vice and basic text services like SMS or e-mail etc, she added.
She said that GPRS and EDGE were the enhancement to GSM enabling Internet access, remote coverage and video streaming. Regarding foreign investments in the telecom sector, Eileen said that there were several Middle Eastern companies including Etisalat, Wardi Telecom International, Wateen Telecom, Wataniya Telecom and Orascom Telecom were providing services in Pakistan. She observed that Pakistan's media landscape was becoming more competitive and transitioning from government control to commercial enterprise as a free press.
She pointed out that editorial coverage brought about commercial successes in the markets, while media was competitive for story angels and striving hard for story makers at the same time.
Private companies are spending million of dollars on media training programmes across the world to enable the journalists to communicate in a professional and better way, she pointed out. Eileen stressed that journalists could shape the world opinion of their country as an emerging market, adding that improvement in perception was indebted to professionalism. "Perception is the most critical factor for success in any media environment," she maintained.
She laid stress on media person to avoid intimidating interviewee, however follow the aim to stimulate it during the interview, while conversation and close interaction would bring comfort for extracting more news. "Story author should be a little sceptical and act as a filter for readers or viewers," she added.
She said that interviewee should be made known of the readers and viewers psychology. While the interviewer should be positive in behaviour to build good friendly relationship. She suggested that interviewer should ask difficult questions but with mild tone and should not get aggressive, as simple language would relive the interviewee.