What happened to Filbalad News website ?? After two months of upgrading the website to become a Web 2.0 look alike I found out that they closed their news and political section .
Why ??
It was very successful as far as I could see and It received comments and good reactions .
It is ridiculous to close their successful news section and keep their sports and Arts sections , well may be someone wants the Egyptians to think only in those two things only !!??
That website was my favourite and I made it my homepage for its news section but now.. ??
I am asking why again ??
Did they receive orders from someone especially they used to host people like Ibrahim Eissa in the Website ?? or what ??
Update "8/6" : Please read the comments below because a kindly member of Filbalad answered my question
It's a good question and here I hope is an answer.
ReplyDeleteThere are several parts to the answer.
The first was a resource problem. In order to cover the local news in a timely manner and not just Cairo, we would need to invest in a lot of new people. We don't have those resources yet, relying on advertising for revenues in a market that is a long way behind the rest of the world in terms of advertising online. We also found that for much of the news we were recreating the news of bigger news organisations, albeit with our own flavour. To compete properly would have meant tripling existing staff. However, we do intend to be back with a new and mighty news service in the near future, teaming up with other sources of news to create something entirely new - including round-ups of the prominent blogs, and a full archive of every newspaper and magazine in the country, supplemented with some kick-ass commentary and opinion. How long that takes is not entirely in our hands. Also, FilBalad has had a bit of an identity crisis - is it a news site, or is it a portal with lots of services in it? It's very difficult to be both.
We're growing the other sites now as independent (you'll notice that filgoal and filfan are no longer in a filbalad environment, and we intend to pull out community classifieds as a separate site, and another which is directory heavy (web directory, movies, night life, games and so on). What should be left, and hopefully launched is a full FilBalad news site, fully focused on local news with a lot of user/reader input.
So, to sum up, resources and a lack of focus forced us to change our strategy, concentrate on creating each of our websites as a strong niche publication, then re-launching filbalad.
Thank you for your interest/comments
Thank 1000 times Con for the rapid reply
ReplyDeleteGood luck in your work ,already I understand what you mean by the shortage of resources
already I am waiting currently for this near future , because seriously guys you made a great webbsite
so good luck for another time