Al-Shuruq's Big Story: A New Paper Scores Big

The fact that a relatively new independent Egyptian paper broke the story of the Sudan raid (though identifying the attackers as American rather than Israeli) has drawn international attention to the newspaper Al-Shuruq (the Sunrise). And the newspaper itself is tickled pink about being quoted by The New York Times and others, and is bragging about it, justifiably.

This was a new paper to me, and in fact today's edition is Issue 55, so it's only a couple of months old. As can be seen from the Adobe Acrobat versions of its hard-copy pages, it's slick, has a color front page, and if you read Arabic, is obviously a serious paper. For more information about the paper's background, here's a post by The Arabist from today, which gives some background. It still doesn't have an entry on Wikipedia's "Newspapers in Egypt" category, but I suspect will get one now. The paper's main website page is here, for HTML, and the link for the .pdf version was given above.

UPDATE: As always, I learn from my readers. A commenter draws my attention to a post here, which includes the following footnote back on March 11:

* This is a new newspaper, available at www.shorouqnews.com, launched last month, by an Egyptian corporate group that includes the venerable publishing house Dar Al-Shorouq (original publisher of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz among other things), so it is not a fly-by-night. Judgments about how its place in the Egyptian establishment might be reflected in its news will have to come later. posted by badger at 6:51 PM

Thanks for the additional information, which I did not know. Egyptian newspapers were, for a long time, dominated by the government-owned press, nationalized under Nasser; in the Sadat era some opposition papers appeared, but these were usually the official publications of the opposition political parties. Most were weeklies, but Al-Wafd (its website is now down) managed to publish daily. The Socialist Labor Party paper Al-Sha‘b managed to be taken over, like the party itself, by the Muslim Brotherhood. These papers were rarely available outside central Cairo, being dependent on the government papers for printing presses. They were on the one hand often wild and unreliable, and on the other, easily intimidated. They could criticize the "government" in the sense of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, but the President, his family, the Army and the Security Services were off limits. Some of this still applies to the newer independent papers, as seen in the recent ban on any reporting of Army-police clashes.

In the past few years, with the growth of wealthy investors in Egypt, independent newspapers have proliferated. The big government dailies, Al-Ahram and the separate publishing houses of Akhbar al-Yom and Al-Gumhuriyya (once edited by Anwar Sadat!) roughly highbrow, middlebrow, and popular respectively, have been challenged by new independently-owned papers. The feisty Al-Dustur is a strong critic of the government though not the mouthpiece of a specific party; its Editor, Ibrahim ‘Isa, has been in trouble with the security services on more than one occasion. Less confrontational is Al-Masry al-Youm (the Editor in me insists on Al-Misri al-Yawm, but that isn't their preferred spelling), which has an online English selection of key articles, though often not felicitously translated. It is an up-market paper clearly aimed at the same elite readership as Al-Ahram. And, as I noted earlier this month, it recently got its own printing presses, making it more independent of the government media. Now, Al-Shuruq seems to be challenging the same market. And they have suddenly gotten a lot of attention by breaking a big story.

The big government papers are loss-leaders, sclerotic in coverage and still hampered by a reluctance to criticize the government. The arrival of new, upmarket, elite papers that are independently owned is interesting, but comes at a time when print journalism is in trouble worldwide. And as I noted after the Army-police troubles, newer technologies are harder to regulate than traditional newspapers. Still, both Al-Masry al-Youm and now, Al-Shuruq seem to be showing some promise at a time when Al-Ahram is trying to rein in its underpaid staff's widespread freelancing.

So congratulations to Al-Shuruq on making a splash internationally when they're only up to Issue 55.