Backdating stories to win in ‘breaking news’ is not cool

For those who haven’t noticed, Dawn.com has been doing a good job on the news reporting front lately.

They’ve been getting stuff filed to their website, there is better coordination with their TV channel, and they have increased pace remarkably! This is all good stuff (I always turn to Dawn as at the end of the day, I always consider them the competition, and still expect them to lead the pack) but the pace of story uploads has been perhaps a little too remarkable?

I’m not saying they’re backdating their stories….and I’m not saying there is never a legit reason to backdate….but lets hope the “lets backdate so it looks like we broke it first” syndrome does not become a staple act of local online media.

Technical glitch? Backdating?

The above was (noticed for a while) and captured by my sub Shaheryar Popalzai @Spopalzai

MQM a national party? No says Facebook, Yes says Tribune poll

So we opted to run an interesting poll today in light of Chaudhry Nisar of the PML-N declaring the MQM to not be a national party. The question:

In your opinion, is the MQM a national party?

We ran this poll (as always) simultaneously on the Tribune site and our Facebook page. The results?

 

The voting on the Facebook page (where one userid = one vote, so cheating would require making a HUGE number of ids, OR convincing a large number of supporters to go vote) went quite heavily against the MQM with 349 people voting so far:

On the Tribune site poll (where there are many ways to cheat – though usually people aren’t invested enough to bother), 2 hours into the poll, the results looked kinda the same with less than 200 people having voted at the time.

Three hours later I check back to find this is the new tally:

Er…

Hm…

Er…

*no comment*