BOL Network has wrapped up a two-day training session under the Digital Sahafat program, bringing the next generation of digital tools to its newsrooms in Karachi and Lahore. The training was delivered in partnership with Tech Valley Pakistan and the Google News Initiative (GNI), extending a programme that has already reached more than 4,000 learners across Pakistan since its September 2024 launch, spanning freelance reporters, content creators, and entire newsrooms at outlets including HUM News. With over 50 newsroom members now trained across Karachi and Lahore, BOL Network’s rollout adds another major Pakistani media house to the programme’s growing list of participants.
As media landscapes evolve, Digital Sahafat’s curriculum has increasingly focused on integrating AI directly into daily newsroom workflows. BOL Network’s teams were introduced to tools including customized Gems and interactive Gemini features, learning to streamline routine tasks, speed up research, and save time that journalists can redirect toward delivering accurate, impactful, and timely stories. This AI-focused emphasis reflects how the programme has evolved since its original launch, when training centred more heavily on verification tools like Google Trends, Reverse Image Search, and Pinpoint for parsing large document sets, before expanding to cover generative AI applications specifically.
Digital Sahafat has been rolled out through a range of institutional partners over the past two years, including sessions at International Islamic University’s Media and Communication Studies department, a two-day Punjab Education Department workshop for reporters, producers, and content creators in Lahore, and a dedicated Digital Sahafat 2.0 scholarships programme launched by the Sindh government alongside PITP-II in September. Each of these sessions has followed a broadly similar format, with Google-certified trainers delivering hands-on instruction in local languages, giving the programme a consistent pedagogical approach even as it scales across different provinces, universities, and now individual newsrooms like BOL Network.
With training in Karachi and Lahore now complete, BOL Network said its Islamabad team is next in line for the programme, continuing the rollout across the network’s major bureaus. Project Manager Sameen Aziz, who leads Digital Sahafat for Tech Valley in Pakistan, has previously described the programme’s impact on newsroom efficiency as dramatic, citing feedback from journalists who said verification work that once took hours could now be completed far faster using the Google tools covered in training. As Digital Sahafat continues expanding its reach across Pakistan’s media sector, BOL Network’s rollout adds a concrete data point to the programme’s broader goal of embedding AI literacy into everyday journalism practice across the country’s major news organizations.
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