Financial pressure brought about by low sales in these tough economic times has pushed the observer newspaper to move back to publishing once a week.
The newspaper which started by the late Ogen Kevin Aliro and a group of former monitor journalists began as a weekly then named Weekly Observer is now tri-weekly. It comes out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Surprisingly it is one of the highly read newspapers in Uganda but with low circulation and low advertising revenue.
A source at the newspaper who spoke to us said that he had heard about the plans to go weekly in December.
“I am not so sure but for some time I have heard these discussions about going weekly. We are facing some tough challenges with the business and it does not make business sense to remain tri-weekly,” the source said.
Normally newspapers start as weekly, move to bi-weekly, then go to tri-weekly and may go daily if at all they attain commercial success.
Starting out as a family kind of paper, the Observer was a soft newspaper focusing on fact and investigation. Since the recruitment of Robert Spin Mukasa, who worked at the Daily Monitor for sometime, the paper has assumed a more hard hitting editorial policy with some of the biggest headlines in terms of impact being published in the market.
