Your newsletter subscriptions are subject to Al Majalla privacy policy and terms and conditions. The Future of Print. Caryle Murphy. That was the purpose of, for example, Egyptian Affairs , a gazette launched in by Muhammad Ali of Egypt.
Privately produced publications began appearing in Baghdad, Cairo, Beirut, and other Arab cities around the same period. Al-Ahram , still a leading Egyptian paper, was founded in Today there are almost two hundred newspapers in the Arab world, the vast majority of them published in Arabic; about a quarter are French or English language papers. Newspapers will take in around USD1. The number of Facebook users in the Arab world has tripled in the last two years and as of June stands at Unlike their Western counterparts, most Arab newspapers and many magazines are still performing relatively well.
Advertising revenue has declined in recent years, but not yet enough to generate a crisis. News consumers in the Middle East still love to hold their newspaper, rustling its pages as they sip their coffee. But the future is quite a different story. It is not yet entirely clear how this will affect the current advertising-dependent business model of Arab print journalism and media.
But what is certain, these experts say, is that if publications want to weather the coming storm they must start to experiment with new digital content, new ways of reaching readers and new revenue streams. In a poll of more than five hundred news consumers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Booz found that 76 percent already had reduced or stopped reading print newspapers and instead were getting their news online.
It will not continue like that. Newspapers were close behind, garnering 37 percent. Newspaper circulation growth has also been slowing and recorded its smallest increase in First, the Middle East is a youthful region, with 53 percent of its population below the age of twenty-five.
