By Mohammad Shoeb
DOHA: A high-level Spanish business delegation, led by Juan Luis Cebrian, Chairman of PRISA group, the world’s largest media conglomerate in Spanish and Portuguese languages, visited Dar Al Sharq’s head office recently.
Top officials of Dar Al Sharq Group, Qatar’s leading printing and publishing company, held meetings with the delegates and exchanged ideas on the current and future outlook of the local and global media industry and the emerging trends.
Cebrian was accompanied by Antonio Navalon, Representative of PRISA Group; Roberto Alcantara, and Leon Fernando del Canto, International Counsel.
Abdullatif Al Mahmoud, CEO, Dar Al Sharq Group; Jaber Al Harami, Deputy CEO for Printing, Publications and Advertising, and Editor-in-Chief, Al Sharq; and
Dr. Khalid bin Mubarak Al-Shafi, Editor-in-Chief, The Peninsula joined the visiting delegation for talks. Al Mahmoud briefed the delegates on Dar Al Sharq Group’s business operations across the country.
“We intend to discuss the future of our cooperation and explore new business and investment opportunities,” said Cebrian, a prominent writer and veteran journalist with over five decades of experience in the industry.
“Qatar is a wonderful country, which I visited five-six times over the past few years and would love to come again and again.”
The PRISA group, founded in 1972, has grown to become one of the largest companies in the world’s media industry.
It has a wide range of diversified business from newspaper to education. It has stakes in some of the most prominent media organisations in the world such as Diario AS sports newspaper, Le Monde, and El País among others.
El País, which literally means ‘The Country’, is the highest-circulation daily in Spain. Le Monde, which means ‘The World’, is published from Paris and is one of the most important and widely respected newspapers in the world.
Diario AS is a Spanish sports newspaper, concentrating particularly on football.
As of 2014, the PRISA group owned 95 percent of the Portuguese media company, Media Capital, which controls TVI TV channel and several radio stations, among others.
The countries with its radio operations include Spain, Portugal, Columbia, Chile, Argentina and Mexico and more.
Meanwhile, in an interview with The Peninsula, Cebrian said the print media globally is facing tremendous challenges due to the advent of Internet and new technologies. Therefore, most print media, especially in advanced countries with high Internet and smartphones penetration, are switching to digital media by transforming this real challenge into an opportunity.
“The Internet is an invention which is as important, or more important, than the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which changed the history of the world.
“And the Internet today is also changing the history of the world. It is helping in the process of globalisation across all sectors of human activities, including the media industry,” he said.
Cebrian said in Europe and America, digital media is the popular trend and newspapers based there are facing a tough time.
“In Spain, printed newspapers have lost about 50 percent of their circulation over the past five to six years largely due to technological tools and financial crisis. The industry has lost nearly 70 percent of advertisement revenues,” Cebrian added.
He said regardless of these dramatic changes, the need for professional and credible journalists will continue, and will become more important and indispensable because of the fact that there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation being fed by the Internet through the ‘new media’, which is creating confusion among people.
“A lot of information we receive through the Internet daily is difficult to analyse.
“What is true and what is not, we don’t know. So society will continue to need services of credible, reliable and profession journalists in future,” he concluded.The Peninsula
