Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up--III

...continuation of the series of posts on the state of media in Nepal
Full disclosure: I temporarily work for the Kathmandu Post right now. However, my beliefs regarding the media have hardly, changed, strengthened even.
The Poor Papers-3

The youngest of English Newspapers in Nepal is Republica. The papers started about a year and a half ago, after the management of Kantipur publications changed hands. The old management took the entire editorial/design/publishing team with itself and started the Nepali newspaper Nagarik and the English newspaper Republica.

Republica has had a very specific target readership in mind. Just like THT has the corporate world as its target readership, and the Kathmandu post pretty much everyone, Republica targets 'the Nepali youth' as its readership. And that, is a problem.

Republica gets caught in its mission statement just too often, frequently forgetting its journalistic integrity and standards. While I am sure they try to get as near to the truth as possible, their reporting is often shoddy and flawed, the coverage of events incomprehensible. In attempting to reach out to the 'Nepali youth', they cover events that would not deserve them, this taking the importance of real events that need to be covered down with their own standards, The core editorial team seems to be oblivious to the workings of the 'youth team' which shows in the poorly-edited 'youth pages'. Poor grammar, cliched pieces, and shoddy reporting plague this paper and it will have a hard time improving its image if it continues at the current rate.

The situation has gotten even worse after the newspaper expanded to 16 pages recently. The pages are more of a reminder of how wrong unplanned expansion can go rather than a show of Republica's journalistic excellence or its aim to 'reach out to the youth.'

This is the last piece in the series of THE POOR PAPERS sub-series, where I talked about the problems with English newspapers in Nepal. The Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up series will continue, and I will look other problems with the Nepali media.