Kathmandu, March 27 -- By leaking the report on the Gen Z killings and atrocities that the authorities had been sitting on for a fortnight, the weekly has once again cemented its decades-long reputation for breaking classified information and challenging the establishment.

In the early 1990s, as Nepal basked in the new light of multi-party democracy following an end of the party-less Panchayat system, weekly newspapers were the undisputed mainstream. Before the rise of broadsheet dailies, weeklies were the primary vehicles for political analysis and public information.

One of the most influential at the time was Drishti, operated as a 'mission journalism' project and widely regarded as the mouthpiece of the CPN-UML. At its peak, Drishti...