Pan-Arab portal adds a new syndication service
Jinfo Blog

17th June 2008

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Al Bawaba, which operates Albawaba.com http://www.albawaba.com/, a pan-Arab news portal, has launched Syndicate to help publishers that focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Central/South Asia to generate revenue from news, photo and video content. This will supplement revenue from the more traditional newsstand, subscription and advertising sales. Syndicate will also let publishers increase distribution of their content into the international marketplace, thus increasing exposure to their brands, and drive traffic back to their web sites. For researchers in the Western world access to sources from the Middle East, Africa and Asia in the original languages are becoming critical to providing a more complete research service. This distribution portal means that access to some of the more difficult to find material has just got a bit easier. Al Bawaba has distribution rights for more than 160 information sources. These are publications in a number of languages including Arabic, Dari, English, Farsi, French, Greek, Hindi, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Pashto, Turkish and Urdu. The following sources have licensed their content for distribution via Al Bawaba: Gulf News, Arab Times, Dar Al Hayat, L’Orient-Le Jour, ArabianBusiness.com, Trade Arabia and the Emirates News Agency, WAM. Executives from many of the sources have commented on the new service. Nicholas Coates, Associate Editor at Gulf News said: ‘As the leading Arab-based English language newspaper in the region, Gulf News is pleased to be associated with Al Bawaba and the launch of their new service Syndigate. Other messages of support came from Davis Westley, Editorial Director at ITP Digital Publishing (ArabianBusiness.com) and from Sajjad Valadi, Foreign Service Manager at Moj News Agency in Iran (the first and sole Iranian economic online news source). Distribution agreements to supply content have been made with the following aggregators: Dow Jones Factiva, Financial Times Information, LexisNexis, ProQuest, COMTEX News Network, Thomson Reuters Westlaw, EBSCO, NewsEdge, YELLOWBRIX, NewsBank, CENGAGE Learning, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, Newscom, InfoDesk, and ISI Emerging Markets. With the wide distribution of material via such a diverse number of aggregators there seems little reason for researchers not to be able to get to the key sources from these important markets.

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