Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Newspapers then & now

Between the 1940s and the 1950s, there was a known man from Al Ain, Musabah bin Obaid Al Daheri, who used to gather news from local people who lived there as well. He started writing news he received on bags, and then posts it on the walls of his coffee shop for his customers to read when they come. This newspaper was called “ Jaredat Al Nakhay”. For that time, this paper had a lot of content compared to others, it was mostly because the stories came from the people themselves. It consisted of stories that were normally posted in other daily newspapers such as accidents, crimes, births, deaths and marriages, travel, news about rulers and what they have been doing. This was different for the people of the country, so then people started wanting to read about more news whether it was local or not, it was something that caught their interest.



Almost two decades later, in 1969 people have become more literate so the government used journalism to encourage people to read even more and be more united , this is when the newspaper “Al Ittihad” was published in Abu Dhabi two years before the emirates were united and still remains till today. “Al Ittihad” means unity, even though this happened before the emirates were united, it shows that Sheikh Zayed did want to bring the seven emirates together, he had that vision already and wanted to make it happen.



When newspapers came out, some of them were printed in Kuwait and Beirut because printing was too expensive so they couldn’t set up a printing press in the United Arab Emirates, and they were sent all the way to the United Arab Emirates through Egypt and Baghdad, it was a long journey so people received old news, but because of the high illiteracy rate, it wasn’t useful for a lot of people to get news like the radio. However, this made people want to learn how to read since the content of the papers were topics that interested the people at that time.

The first print of Al Ittihad newspaper, and one of the current ones:

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