Shaping the Future of Journalism

Established in 2003, as a limited by liability company under companies ordinance 1984, Mishal has been engaged with some of the most dynamic organizations, including media enterprises and global development agencies helping them develop their communication strategies and solutions for better understanding and creating synergies with their concerned stakeholders.

Mishal is at the forefront of devising and delivering communication solutions for a cross-section of stakeholders and is actively pursuing and supporting initiatives to improve the state of media and journalism in Pakistan. The core team of Mishal has developed and managed media entities and broadcast content for the last 20 years at various platforms and for leading national and international organizations. The next level for Mishal is to actively pursue identified initiatives to build the capacity of media in Pakistan and benchmark Pakistan’s media with international standards. Such initiatives will enable equal opportunities for media professionals in primary and secondary targets and also help them develop better understanding of the issues in global perspective.
Mishal has undertaken the task to build the capacity of press cubs and journalist associations in Pakistan by creating a learning platform for the media and journalists across Pakistan. The initiative will build the capacity through interactive workshops, conferences, collaborative thinking and knowledge sharing. It is also focusing on improving the competitiveness of the media by creating competition amongst the various verticals through media and journalism awards for the professionals in the field of communications.

Our Vision
Education, Entertainment and Enlightenment constitute the ultimate key to human growth and advancement. The Mishal philosophy takes its birth from this very principle, the ultimate vision being to cater for the growing need of meaningful and focused communication outreach.

Corporate Philosophy:
Mishal’s foremost domain of activity is strategic communication with a spotlight on media relations, behavior change communication, perception management and future scenario predictions using methodologies and resources that service the lifestyle and social needs of individuals, their families, the communities they live in and ultimately their larger domains.
Our strategic communication initiatives, therefore, aim at assisting people gain the awareness, knowledge and ability to meet their developmental needs. The initiatives center on people, their needs and perceptions, helping them understand issues and be able to act in ways that improve their health, education, social and economic well-being. Our approach is interactive developed through partnerships and collaborations with the target stakeholders.

Mishal’s Mission & Objectives

• To facilitate the media to understand issues in global perspective.
• Building the capacity of the media and professionals attached with the industry to have a knowledge sharing platform to collaborate information as a learning platform.
• To understand and innovate, improve competitiveness and ground-breaking possibilities for building the capacity of the media to report responsibly, factually and more effectively.
• Set the highest standards of creative work with a rich motivational and influential content.
• Create more competition among the stakeholders in the communication sector to improve the creation of quality content in various verticals through media and journalism recognition awards and creating opportunities for the professionals to exchange their experiences both at the regional as well as global level.
• Associations and Partnerships
• Press Clubs
• Associations of Journalists
• Public Sector
• Media Houses
• Academia
• Regulatory bodies
• International Linkages

Mishal’s Areas of Activities

Capacity Building and Human Resource Development
Capacity building refers to assistance that is provided to entities, usually societies in developing economies, which have a need to develop a certain skill or competence, or for general upgrading of performance ability. Most capacity is built by in through interaction between societies themselves, sometimes in the public, sometimes in the non-governmental and sometimes in the private sector. Mishal provides capacity building as a part of its core objective of building a more informed and well networked nations through technical cooperation with the key stakeholders i.e. bilaterally funded entities, other development agencies and sector consulting firms.
Capacity Building is, however, not limited to sector development instead Mishal has taken this to the next level by taking capacity building in terms of sector development through the inter-clusters communications approach. Earlier, Mishal’s approach to capacity building is being used by governments to transform community and industry approaches to social, economic and environmental problems.

Competitive Intelligence (CI)
Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing Intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.
Key points:

• Competitive intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice, as opposed to industrial espionage which is illegal.
• The focus is on the external business environment.
• There is a process involved in gathering information, converting it into intelligence and then utilizing this in business decision making. MISHAL CI emphasize that if the intelligence gathered is not usable (or actionable) then it is not intelligence.
• A more focused approach of CI regards it as the organizational function responsible for the early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious. We call this process the early signal analysis. This definition focuses attention on the difference between dissemination of widely available factual information (such as market statistics, financial reports, newspaper clippings) performed by functions such as libraries and information centers, and competitive intelligence which is a perspective on developments and events aimed at yielding a competitive edge
• The term CI is often viewed as synonymous with competitor analysis, but competitive intelligence is more than analyzing competitors — it is about making the organization more competitive relative to its entire environment and stakeholders: customers, competitors, distributors, technologies, macro-economic data etc.
• Strategic Planning

Mishal helps organizations to develop an organization’s process of defining its strategy, direction, and providing input to the management making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. We deploy various business analysis techniques, which can be used in strategic planning, including:6.3.1 SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)

• PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological)
• STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors)
• EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatics, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal)

Mishal assists the management in designing and deploying strategic planning as the formal consideration of an organization’s future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:
a) What to do?
b) For whom to do it for?
c) How to excel? In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased “How can we beat or avoid competition?”
Strategic Planning is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.
In order to determine where it is going, we help the organization to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the “strategic plan.”
It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan organizational strategy. Therefore, Mishal’s strategic innovation and tinkering with the ‘strategic plan’ becomes to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.

Scenario Prediction & Planning
Scenario planning, also called scenario thinking and scenario analysis is a strategic planning method that Mishal offers to make flexible long-term plans for its clients. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by traditional intelligence gathering and making future scenarios.
The original method is that a group of analysts would generate simulation for policy makers. The collective scenarios will be known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political, industrial, information, and, with plausible alternative social, technical, economic, environmental, educational, political and aesthetic (STEEEPA) trends which are key driving forces.
Scenario planning may involve aspects of systems thinking, specifically the recognition that many factors may combine in complex ways to create sometime surprising futures (due to non-linear feedback loops). The method also allows the inclusion of factors that are difficult to formalize, such as novel insights about the future, deep shifts in values, unprecedented regulations or inventions. This used in conjunction with scenario planning leads to plausible scenario story lines because the causal relationship between factors can be demonstrated. In these cases when scenario planning is integrated with a systems thinking approach to scenario development, it is sometimes referred to as structural dynamics.

Crafting scenarios
These combinations and permutations of fact and related social changes are called “scenarios.” The scenarios usually include plausible, but unexpectedly important situations and problems that exist in some small form in the present day. Any particular scenario is unlikely. However, future studies analysts select scenario features so they are both possible and uncomfortable. Scenario planning helps policy-makers to anticipate hidden weaknesses and inflexibilities in organizations and methods.
When disclosed years in advance, these weaknesses can be avoided or their impacts reduced more effectively than if similar real-life problems were considered under duress of an emergency. For example, a company may discover that it needs to change contractual terms to protect against a new class of risks, or collect cash reserves to purchase anticipated technologies or equipment. Flexible business with “PREsponse protocols” helps cope with similar operational problems and deliver measurable future value-added.

Strategic Communication
Strategic Communication is one of Mishal’s specialized fields where communicating a concept, a process, or data that satisfies a long term strategic goal of a client by allowing facilitation of advanced planning, or communicating over long distances usually using international telecommunications or dedicated global network assets to coordinate actions and activities of operationally significant commercial subunits. It also means working with the related function within organizations that takes care of internal and external communication processes.
At Mishal strategic communication management is the systematic planning and realization of information flow, communication, media development and image care in a long-term horizon. It conveys deliberate message(s) through the most suitable media to the designated audience(s) at the appropriate time to contribute to and achieve the desired long-term effect. Communication management is process creation. It has to bring three factors into balance:
a) the message(s)
b) the media channel(s)
c) the audience(s)
Current multinational concept development and experimentation defines Strategic Communication as “a function to integrate internal and external communication processes at all levels of an organization in order to promote the cohesion and coherence of the organization, and advance its interests and objectives”.

Public and Media Relations
Public and Media Relations (or PMR) is a field concerned with maintaining public image for high-profile people, organizations, or programs. Mishal’s Public and Media Relations (PMR) concerns professions working in public message shaping for the functions of:

• Communication
• Community relations
• Crisis management
• Customer relations
• Employee relations
• Government affairs
• Industry relations
• Investor relations,
• Media relations
• Mediation
• Publicity
• Speech-writing, and
• Visitor relations

PMR can be used to build rapport with employees, customers, investors, voters, or the general public. Almost any organization that has a stake in how it is portrayed in the public arena employs some level of public relations. There are a number of related disciplines falling under the banner of Corporate Communications, such as Analyst Relations, Media Relations, Investor Relations, Internal Communications and Labor Relations. Mishal focuses on building relationships that help to establish rapport with publics.
There are many areas of public and media relations, but the most recognized are financial public relations, product public relations, and crisis public relations.

• Financial public relations – providing information mainly to business reporters
• Product public relations – gaining publicity for a particular product or service (rather than using advertising)
• Crisis public relations – responding to negative accusations or information

Media Consultancy
Mishal’s special service of Media Consultancy is a holistic approach to clients for Media development, specializing in electronic and print media including content creation and distribution strategy, production expertise, business and marketing strategies across local and global television/print and new media markets. Mishal services to television channels, production companies, mobile phone providers, broadband platforms and captive audience networks.
Mishal develops global formats that can be localized for individual markets and expand the reach for new or existing media properties whilst building audience and revenue potential.

Management Consultancy
Management consulting is the practices of helping organizations improve their performance, primarily through the analysis of existing business problems and development of plans for improvement.
Organizations hire Mishal’s services of management consultancy for a number of reasons, including gaining external (and presumably objective) advice and access to the consultants’ specialized expertise.
Because of Mishal’s exposure to and relationships with numerous organizations, Mishal is aware of industry “best practices”.
Mishal also provide organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services. Mishal generally brings its own, proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems, and to serve as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing business tasks.
9 Independent Productions/Documentaries
Mishal provides professionally produced Corporate, Commercial and Broadcast work aimed at communicating your message to your target market through creative concepts that work.
Our highly experienced professionals offer a broad range of skills and our production centre boasts ‘state of the art’ facilities ensuring the highest possible quality results.
Documentary film is a broad category of visual expressions that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to “document” reality. Although “documentary film” originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television series. Documentary, as it applies here, works to identify a “filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception” that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries, this not only ensures creativity but also the ‘out of box’ approach as well.
Mishal offer a wide range of services including

• Documentaries
• Corporate Videos
• Training Videos
• Video News Releases (VNR)
• DVD Production (Corporate, Induction, Product Launches, Special Occasions etc.)
• Graphical representations

With innovative and original concepts and extensive marketing savvy, Mishal provides cost-effective solutions to communication needs.

Mishal offers digital editing in non-linear edit suites. Field acquisition can be in SP or SX Betacam, XDCAM or DVCAM format. Audio is important and Mishal can provide quality audio services from music selection through to a huge range of voices and effects.

A fully equipped state of the art studio, with superior lighting facilities and a huge chroma-key flat, enables us to control all elements of studio production irrespective of exterior environments.

Consultancies
Through its strategic partners, Mishal provides consultancies in the field of:

• Management
• Media
• Interactive media
• Telecommunications
• Creative Solutions
• Technology
• Mobile Solutions
• Mobile TV

Consumer Surveys and Research
Mishal with its strategic partner Emteltech (Pvt.) Limited is been on the forefront of the market research and surveys company. A global service provider of sampling solutions for survey research. Emteltec is the part of statistical practice concerned with the selection of individual observations intended to yield some knowledge about a population of concern, especially for the purposes of statistical inference.
Mishal is a critical part of marketing research and end users often invest significantly in conclusions gained from the data. Mishal gives researchers access to consumer and business-to-business research respondents in 800+ cities, districts and towns in Pakistan via Internet, telephone – both landline and wireless/mobile – and mail. Mishal also provides survey programming and hosting, data processing, and design consultation.

Media buying/selling
Media Buying is a sub function of Mishal’s communication strategy. Media Buying is the procurement of the best possible placement and price of a piece of media real-estate within any given media. The main task of Media Buying lies within the negotiation of price and placement to ensure the best possible value can be secured.
On behalf of its clients, Mishal purchases time and advertising space for the purpose of strategic and advertising communication. When planning what to buy, Mishal evaluates factors based on but not limited to station formats, pricing rates, demographics, geographic, and psychographics relating to the advertisers particular product or service objectives. Mishal optimizes what to buy and on which budget, type of medium (radio, internet, TV, print), quality of the medium (target audience, time of day for broadcast, etc.), and how much time and space is wanted. Mishal can purchase spot, regionally, nationally or internationally. Mishal factors in determinates based on a region by region basis. Rates, demand of leads, space, and time, and media will vary geographically.

Mishal Products

• Electronic media products
• Online Hiring solutions
• Corporate videos
• Public service messages
• Television shows
• Documentaries
• News bulletins
• Current Affairs
• Thematic Features and Dramas