Media and mass communication

This article discusses internet use and online newspaper accessing behaviour of academics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sindh, Jamshoro. A self-completion close-ended questionnaire was designed and copies distributed among a purposive-sample of academic staff at the University. The sample included all the faculty members (i.e. visiting, on contract and regular) working in the Department of Social Sciences. The study found that academics who are internet-users, or 'netters', for the most part, used internet at their residences – home and hostel, and accessed mostly two online newspapers. Finally, the majority of academics preferred to access English-language online newspapers.

Daily newspapers in the world are shrinking in many dimensions. All big or small newspapers are getting smaller in size, business and news circulation. The speed at which newspapers are shutting down is not much different from the early 20th century. Thus, most newspapers are shifting from conventional setting to online/ digital newspapers only. Since the last two decades, the business of newspaper has declined as many newspapers have migrated business and appearance online to retain print readers via online only consumers and attract new ones who are just netters in the world. This change has been noticed in all countries. Pakistan is also one among those countries in which new technology is being adopted in the field of media. Due to information communication technologies, most of the Pakistani print, electronic media organization has switched to online to keep pace with the developed world. Hence, most of the conventional/traditional newspapers become digital newspapers along wit...

Television messages are one of the essential means to disseminate polio messages in the prevention of infectious diseases. However, little is known about the hegemony of political actors specifically government in power over televised health content and its impact on people's perceptions to adopt or reject a health attitude, particularly in developing countries. Theoretically, Bandura in his social cognitive theory (1997) has examined the change in mind-sets through observational learning, media and social surroundings. However, his research lacks to underline state dominancy over people's health decisions with reference to political leadership. This study fills the gap by critically investigating political factors that obstruct Pakistani television channels to disseminate productive and informative polio messages, for boosting self-efficacy among lower middle class Jamshoro parents, thus encouraging them to vaccinate their children against polio in Sindh province of Pakistan. The methodological approach employs critical paradigm with qualitative investigation through in-depth interviews. Low level of awareness, less credibility of television channels and political hegemony over health messages contributed and enlarged self-efficacy to collective efficacy of political actors during findings of this research study as a new domain in social cognitive theory. In addition, this research sheds light by critically analysing the elements of corruption, unaccountability and lack of transparency involved in ineffective televised polio messages in developing nations as Pakistan, opening a space for policy makers and television officials for a positive health change in designing health awareness campaigns.

Mass media play a decisive role in distributing health knowledge and awareness about health diseases. Covid-19 has been measured as the most dangerous health hazard of the 21st century that has constituted social, environmental and financial perils for humanity, including the media outlets. However, the Pakistani newspaper industry was already witnessing a decline in its readership and coronavirus has further deteriorated the situation for journalists working in regional newspapers. The methodological design using indepth interviews seeks to discover the financial difficulties faced by journalists employed in local or regional newspapers in Hyderabad city of Sindh province, Pakistan. The distress of unpaid salaries, financial security and paid leave were recognized as dominant elements that emerged during the present investigation as the extension to studies conducted concerning health communication. Therefore, this research suggests that government and business tycoons should finan...

The research has been conducted to apply the most fundamental concept of fraud triangle theory, introduced by Donald Cressey’s in 1950-53, to private and public commercial banks of Sindh, Pakistan. According to this theory, Donald Cressey identified that when three-component/factor i-e pressure, opportunity, and rationalization, comes into an individual’s life, he is very likely to commit fraud. Eight different hypotheses are drawn for this study to test the elements of the fraud triangle in public and private sector banks. The study adopted a primary source of data collection, with a sample size of 600 distributed to respondents of the two largest bank of Pakistan, i-e, the National Bank of Pakistan and Habib Bank Limited. The statistical Mann-Whitney U-Test applied to test the hypotheses. The results of the study disclosed that the employees in public sector banks in Sindh, facing more financial pressure, the internal control of public banks is also week; hence fraudsters find mor...

The Wikipedia Encyclopedia describes open source as "practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources." Before the label open source was coined, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept. In fact, earlier researchers used a process which is similar to open standards to develop telecommunication network protocols. Characterized by contemporary open source work, this collaborative process led to the birth of the Internet in 1969. Its application to software gained popularity with the emergence of the Internet. It is said that the open source label came out of a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's announcement that it planned to release the source code for its browser Navigator. The politically correct version is that to clarify a potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the word "free", so that the perception of free software is not anti-commercial, the label open source (contributed by Chris Peterson) stuck. The official version is that it was to shed the confrontational attitude that had been associated with free software in the past and sell the idea on pragmatic, business case grounds to the commercial world. Whatever it may be, Netscape listened and released their code as open source under the name of Mozilla leelinesourcing. That was the beginning of the contemporary open source movement, whose main champion today allegedly is the Open Source Initiative ("OSI") which makes and continues to make a case for the open source software to the commercial world. Consequently, we have seen the application of the open source philosophy in other fields including biotechnology. Linus Torvalds, a finnish software engineer who initiated the development of the Linux kernel went as far as saying "the future is open source everything". According to the OSI, the case for open source software is simple-free access to read, redistribute and modify the source code of a piece of software results in a rapid evolutionary process that produces better software. Advocates of open source argue that when programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. However, evangelists of free software have been at pains to clarify that open source software is not synonymous with free software. The philosophy of the open source movement is based on practicality and not ethical considerations while free software is based on freedom, not price. Borrowing from Richard M. Stallman, "free software" and "open source" describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. While the two are not synonymous, both have a common enemy-proprietary software. Critics of open source say that open source fosters an ambiguity of a different kind, in that it confuses the mere availability of the source code with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it. But open source doesn't just mean access to the source code; the use of open-source software must comply with a number of criteria including as to redistribution , depending on the license under which it is distributed. Different licenses require different criteria. For instance, under the GNU General Public License (GPL) published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for licensing free software, any work based on the program or any other derivative work must be licensed as a whole at no charge at all to all