“Hawlati closes. We did not receive a dinar of help,” the eye-catching headline reads on apparently the last printed issue of the paper, which was out Friday, also referring to an earlier appeal from the owners for public donations.
“We received no contribution from anyone, and it was increasingly difficult for us to continue the work as the whole country is in economic mayhem, so we decided to shut it down,” Tariq Fatih, the owner of the paper told Rudaw.
The paper’s circulation dropped last year to around 2,000 from 6000 several years earlier as the paper went from biweekly to a daily print in 2012.
Although the economic crisis that hit the region has impacted overall media revenues, the downward spiral for print media started long before the two-year-old financial strain that has gripped the region.
According to the Kurdistan Union of Journalists in Erbil, of nearly 900 newspapers, journals and periodicals that have been published in the region since 1993, only a few dozen still publish on paper while others have gone online or out of business, as is also the case elsewhere in the world.
Earlier in February, the Independent became the first British newspaper to stop its print version and continue only online after years of losing money on declining number of daily readers.
The Kurdish Awena weekly has also faced difficult times and announced it will be forced to shut the newspaper if circulation and revenues continue to shrink.
Established in late 2000, Hawlati soon attracted a wide readership in Kurdistan as it tried to be an independent weekly paper with no political affiliations.
In its first issues the paper gave a voice to both critics and supporters of political parties to openly address tough public questions such as corruption and transparency.
But over the past years the paper has widely been criticized for its sensational, and occasionally even offensive, way of reporting on events related to policymakers and public figures, who have often accused Hawlati for being “inaccurate and biased.”
The paper has famously been sued many times in the past by politicians as well as businessmen.
“The only thing that we now ask the government to do is to protect our journalists who have in the past been reporting about sensitive issues relating to corruption or misuse of power and now could face retaliation from people they have exposed,” Fatih said.
