Abu Dhabi: Gulf News is older, wiser and as fresh as ever.
Hundreds of the 1,700-strong staff of Al Nisr Publishing LLC gathered on Monday to make that theme come alive, turning the compound at its Shaikh Zayed Road office into a sea of orange to mark the 35th anniversary of the UAE’s leading paper.
Party music blared beneath a tent set up for the occasion as a massive cake was cut to the tunes of “Happy Birthday” and snacks were shared by staff from editorial, printing press, broadcasting, IT, marketing, contract publications, digital media and distribution.
Gulf News which began as a small tabloid in 1978 has progressed today into a modern-day Berliner with an audited daily circulation of 108,750 copies.
Abdul Hamid Ahmed Editor-in-Chief, Gulf News said: “For 35 years Gulf News has always sought to drive change and today we are able to straddle readers who cannot imagine their lives without a newspaper and those who like to read news on their smartphones.”
K.C. Nissar, Personnel and Administration Manager, who joined the newspaper on May 9, 1979 as an entry-level accounts staff, said: “We started with a daily circulation of 3,000. On my first Sony TV, I watched Betamax movies as there was not much news then. Gulf News filled that void. It still does,” he said, referring to gulfnews.com’s 24-million web page views a month.
Dubai’s advertising fraternity joined in with flower bouquets and congratulatory notes. Satish Mayya, chief executive of Dubai-based BPG Maxus ad house (now celebrating its 33rd year), took a step further: he brought his team along with a violinist and sax player to felicitate the Gulf News staff.
“We’ve grown together with Gulf News,” said Mayya. “The paper leads where others follow. You come out with products — Friday, Classifieds, XPRESS, etc — that help readers and advertisers change their thinking. You’re never the one to blow your own trumphet, so we brought our own sax player.”
