Business today profile on Hisham Kassem

Amira Salah-Ahmed has a profile on Hisham Kassem in his role as vice chairman and CEO of Masry al Youm. I have been writing about Kassem and Masry al youm before, you can find it here.

Here´s a soundbite:
¨On the whole, says Kassem, “the nation’s media has gotten louder and more critical over the past two years,” and he’s convinced there is room for other dailies such as Al-Masry Al-Youm (despite the similarity in the names when translated from Arabic, Al-Masry Al-Youm is of no relation to Egypt Today, bt’s sister publication). “If you have ten dailies like Al-Masry Al-Youm and they need LE 8-9 million to float, with an advertising market that is estimated to be LE 600 million, you can have ten [successful] independent dailies.” This kind of competition also “increases a culture of readership, i.e. expanding the readership market, which is what we need.”

There is also another less positive trend as Kassem points out, the fact that Egypt is one of only 12 countries to impose prison sentences to journalists for libel charges, with several cases the last months.

A third negative trend is the attacks on among others journalist during the last six weeks, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information just released it´s report, called Police men scored it out of the dictionary
Freedom of Expression is not desired in Egypt
April-May 2006 yesterday. Read it!

Masry al youm, al Masry al youm, Masri al youm,Hisham Kassem, Egyptian media, Egypt, attacks on journalists in Egypt, Human Rights