Type Daily newspaper Editor Ramadan Abdel Kader | Format Broadsheet | |
Owner(s) El Tahrir Printing and Publishing House Founded 26 January 1880; 137 years ago (1880-01-26) Political alignment Nationalism, Secularism | ||
The Egyptian Gazette is an English-language Egyptian daily, part of the Al Gomhuria group of news publications.
Contents
First published on 26 January 1880, it is the oldest English-language newspaper in the Middle East.
Khaled Bakir is chairman of the Gazette's board and Mohamed Kassem has been the editor-in-chief since 2014.
History
The Egyptian Gazette was founded in 1880 as a four-page weekly tabloid in Alexandria by five Britons, including Andrew Philip, as editor, and Moberly Bell, later managing editor of The Times in London.
In the 1930s, Cairo became more important than Alexandria as a news centre and the newspaper's offices were moved to the Egyptian capital on 20 February 1938.
Shortly before World War II, ownership of The Egyptian Gazette passed to the Société Orientale de Publicité (SOP) (English: Eastern Publishing Company), in which Oswald J. Finney, a wealthy British businessman, was the major shareholder. The Egyptian Gazette found itself associated with The Egyptian Mail, another English-language Egyptian newspaper, founded in 1914, and also owned by the SOP. The market was split between the two dailies, with the Mail appearing in the morning, and the Gazette in the evening.
At the end of the war and with the departure of most of the British Army stationed in Egypt, the market for English-language newspapers shrank dramatically. As a result, and as continues to the present day, The Egyptian Gazette is published every day except Tuesdays, when the now-weekly The Egyptian Mail appears.
In May 1954, following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the nationalization program of President Nasser, El Tahrir Printing and Publishing House took over ownership of the newspaper from the SOP. Amin Abul Enein was appointed managing editor, bringing the newspaper under the editorial authority of an Egyptian for the first time.
Contributors
While never garnering quite the same international reputation as Al-Ahram Weekly, the English-language weekly published by Al-Ahram, The Egyptian Gazette has provided several important journalists with an opportunity to print their material.
Among these are Muhammad Husayn Haykal, one-time Egyptian education minister; David Du Bois, academic and son of the pan-Africanist leader W. E. B. Du Bois; and, more recently, Caryll Faraldi, British journalist and academic and Ashraf Sadek, Egyptian journalist and academic.