THE biggest defence to press freedom is a profitable media, South Africa's Mail and Guardian board chairman Trevor Ncube has observed.

And Pakistan's Daily Times editor-in-chief Najam Sethi said freedom without responsibility is dangerous.
During the annual press freedom round table at the 62nd World Association of Newspapers Congress and 16th World Editors Forum at Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Ncube said a financially weak media was susceptible to corruption.

Ncube, in reference to the theme of the discussion What Good Is a Mission Without a Business, said any media's mission should make business profitable.

"What drives you is the mission, freedom of the press, democracy, accountability, human rights and empowering the people so that they have a voice and give the government of the day a sense of how people perceive their policies," he said. "With the mission, make business profitable. In carrying out the mission, the businesses that are run are profitable. That defends you from corruption. Weak media are susceptible to government pressure, certain kinds of pressure of the brown envelopes."
Ncube said profitability and sustainability in the media was key.

He said without a mission, perhaps there was no business for the media.
Ncube said they were set to start publishing a newspaper in Zimbabwe called Newsday, which he said would help to heal the nation as it was currently polarised.
He said in excess of three million Zimbabweans had left the country due to the unstable economic and political environment.

"Zimbabwe has gone through difficult times. The past ten years have been horrendous," Ncube said. "Over the last nine months with the coming of the global political agreement, we have seen a change in the political climate. Zimbabweans want to be given an opportunity to move on with their lives. The global political agreement has raised opportunity... and we could play a role. What Zimbabwe needs is a daily newspaper that will participate in national healing, a newspaper that will get the nation to have discourse with itself, a newspaper that all Zimbabweans will trust."

And Sethi, who is this year's recipient of WAN-IFRA Golden Pen of Freedom, said the media needed to be responsible in their work and not take press freedom as a given.

He said Pakistan currently enjoyed relative press freedom and an independent Judiciary but there were certain people whose mindsets had a hangover of jihad, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism due to political Islam.

Sethi, who also runs the Daily Times, said these people, non-state actors, were a threat to his newspapers and it was difficult to run to the state as they were equally threatened.
"I have received death and bombing threats from non-state actors, even from people in the media because of my work," he said.

However, Sethi believes and would want to work in a secular environment but observed that the notion of secularism had been distorted by the government over the last 30 years for their own selfish reasons to mean anti-Islam.

Sethi called for solidarity in the media, saying he wanted to promote economic integration and trade, peace with India and modernity in Pakistan.

And United Kingdom's Guardian managing editor Chris Eliott observed that a newspaper's editorial mission needed to blend with the business side.

Eliott said any newspaper needed a coherent financial strategy.
He said newspapers that spoke truth to the power risked losing advertising but they needed to do the best to survive.

"You have to be profit seeking but put the money back into journalism," he said.
Eliott said the recession had affected the media industry but it had not affected The Guardian's editorial mission.

Eliott also emphasised the need for solidarity in the media globally, saying it was important to support organisations such as WAN, International Press Institute (IPI), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Sans Frontieres.

Morocco's Tel Quel and Nichane publisher Ahmed Benchemsi said his country has had 30 years of propaganda that portrayed it as democratic and yet it was an absolute monarch.

Benchemsi said his publications had tried to reverse that trend because in Morocco, the King was the boss although people were elected to office.

He cited drug smuggling and tax cheating as some challenges that they tried to highlight in the country as well as stories on the monarchy, religion and sex.

Benchemsi said the King in Morocco had businesses in the private sector which contributed six per cent to that country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but those businesses did not advertise in his publications because of their stand.

However, he said theirs was to be a mirror to society although they also had a right to take sides.
Benchemsi said although they operated in a difficult environment, they tried to push the levels of acceptable discourse step by step and every step was a victory.

Benchemsi said they had received several libel suites including one where he was taken to court for disrespecting the King after one of the headlines in their publications referred to the King as "my brother".

Russia's Rostov-on-Don chief executive officer Irina Samokhina emphasised the need for solidarity, sufficient investment in training and education to create a strong independent media globally.
Guatemala's publisher of El Periodico Joze Ruben Zamora said financial sustainability was key in the life of an independent newspaper that wanted to be a vehicle for change.