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Jagadish Pokhrel is the Chief Editor at The Rising Nepal. He joined the English daily as a general assignment reporter in 1990. The liberal environment following the restoration of democracy that year spurred growth of Nepali mass media in the private sector. When English broadsheets hit the newsstand in style, they were ending TRN’s three decades of monopoly. He continued to tend the backyard of TRN, hoping it would play its public service role more effectively some day and regain its foothold. He headed the night desk, wrote editorials and put together the op-ed pages.

In 1999, he worked with staff reporters to cover Nepal’s third general elections. He was the chief reporter when the 11^thSAARC Summit was held in Kathmandu in January 2002. One odd assignment Mr. Pokhrel took up was to set up the online site for the Gorkhapatra dailies. The management at the oldest media house was experimenting with the new media. He edited evening English news bulletins for Nepal Television for two years until 1995 when he went to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, for a six-month news agency journalism diploma.

In 1997, Mr. Pokhrel received a Reuter Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University, USA, for an academic year of non-degree study at the Graduate Department of Communication. Stanford awarded him with a John S. Knight Fellowship, the University’s reputed program for professional journalists.

Mr. Pokhrel is a founder of now-defunct Medialine, which introduced the first electronic news bulletins in the country covering the 1999 general elections. Betting on innovation and enterprise, he affiliated himself with a startup company, called The Word Lab, which aims to help people improve the quality of their documents. One significant highlight of his co-work is Campaign 2008, a public report on media monitoring of the historic Constituent Assembly elections of 2008 published by Press Council Nepal. He is a co-author of Nirbachan 2056, a book on 1999 general elections. He has presented papers in national and international seminars. His co-work on news reporting presented at ‘Social Sciences in the Multicultural World’ was commended as a novel topic in the seminar.

Recipient of PTI award at IIMC and Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh Award at Gorkhapatra Corporation, Mr. Pokhrel served on the jury of International Federation of Journalists Tolerance Prize for South Asia. He has taught journalism at Tribhuvan University and Purbanchal University on news reporting, editing and media research. He holds an MA in Anthropology from TU, with his dissertation focusing on news reporting. He is interested in studying the news media and their relationships with other constituencies in society.

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