Al Raya
Al Raya is an Arabic-language daily newspaper published in Doha, Qatar. It is the semi-official newspaper of the country and is one of the five leading Qatari dailies. As for Arabic dailies published in the country Al Raya is among the three major newspapers along with Al Sharq and Al Watan.
History and profile
Al Raya was launched by the Gulf Company for Printing and Publishing as a weekly newspaper on 10 May 1979. The company, which was founded by Ali bin Jaber Al Thani, also owns Gulf Times, an English-language daily. Based in Doha, Al Raya is the second Arabic newspaper published in Qatar. On 27 January 1980, Al Raya was relaunched as a daily newspaper.In 1996, a corpus was created which included 187 articles published in Al Raya. On 27 April 2012, the paper launched the mapping mangroves project.
Nasser Mohamed Al-Othman was the first editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper. In the initial period, many leading Arab journalists wrote for the daily. Abdulla Ghanim Al Binali Al Muhannadi was appointed editor-in-chief of Al-Raya in 2019. In 2023, Abdulla Taleb Al Marri became the editor-in-chief of the newspaper.
Political stance and content
Although Al Raya is privately owned, it is the semi-official newspaper of Qatar. Therefore, it has a pro-government stance. The major rival of the daily is another Arabic Qatari newspaper, Al Sharq, which has the opposite political stance.Al Raya mostly provides news about the receptions and activities of the ruling family, Al Thani, as well as about official events. In addition, the daily has large supplements on sports and business as well as a special supplement called He and She. The paper offered a weekly page on environmental issues from 1999 to 2005.
Following the 2013 coup in Egypt, Al Raya concentrated on the ongoing demonstrations of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted President Mohamed Morsi. In August 2013, an editorial of the paper argued that possible US-led intervention against Syria would not be celebrated, but the Assad regime was "useless" and caused no other option than such intervention.