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"It's not that publishing a Palestinian newspaper in English was my idea," says Othman Al Haj Mohammed, the proprietor of the new Palestine Times, "but I was the only madman who decided to go for it."
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"Haj Mohammed, a 41-year-old resident of Beit Hanina, north of Jerusalem, says he dreamt of running a newspaper from an early age. By age 10 he had a subscription to Time magazine. He attended high school in Ramallah, later went to the United States, and returned to Ramallah in 1995.
"Three years later, my fondness for magazines and journalism led me to try to put out a magazine called Zaman, in the hopes of creating an Arabic Newsweek. But after a year, I realized there weren't enough readers in the Arab world. We didn't have customers.
"But the field continued to fascinate me. I understood that setting up a magazine or a newspaper isn't all that complicated, but that keeping it up over the years is the real challenge. I spent a number of years in England, and in 2003, when I returned to Ramallah, I started to think about why there wasn't an English-language newspaper that exposes people who don't read Arabic to the Palestinian-Arab angle.
"By the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, the idea was already rolling. We had to get a publishing permit from the Palestinian Authority, and the permit arrived in February 2005. I met with journalists and businesspeople and came to a number of clear conclusions on criteria for success: The newspaper must be independent, it must provide news from a Palestinian angle but not be identified politically with any faction or organization, and it must give all opinions and approaches a platform."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/814835.htmlWebsite:
http://times.ps/
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