Morocco bans newspaper sharing

After catching up with the day's goings-on, it's common to leave unwanted newspapers on cafe tables, bus seats or even to hand it to the person who was stealthily reading along from over your shoulder.

In Morocco, however, sharing newspapers has been banned in a bid to help publishers who say that the gentle gesture is causing them huge financial losses.

The complaint was brought to the country's Minister of Communications, Mustapha el-Khalfi, by the Moroccan Federation of Newspaper Editors [FMEJ] in a report that claimed that the country's media "has lost approximately $150 million per year due to the population's access to newspapers that are left behind in public places." 

	Cafes in Morocco are no longer allowed to give free newspapers to customers [Christopher Lee/Getty]

Following FMEJ's plea, the communications ministry agreed to introduce a number of new measures, including the banning of free newspapers at cafes and newspaper sharing.

"Newspaper editors are undergoing a crisis and we need to limit the damage," el-Khalfi said in an interview with Huffpost Maghreb.

"According to the FMEJ report, each newspaper copy is read by an average of five people," he added.

As part of the new effort to help the country's press, the government has also agreed to form a committee to establish a public fund to stimulate newspaper purchasing, as well as to conduct a special study into Morocco's advertising market.

While the North African kingdom's media industry may indeed be struggling, figures released by international auditing giant KPMG suggest that newspaper sharing is perhaps likely not the culprit for the sector's woes.

"Readers of written press constitute merely one percent of the Moroccan population," a report by the firm stated – making the number of the country's potential newspaper sharers stand at roughly 330,000 out of a population of 33 million.

KPMG also suggested that the problem likely stems from the "various socio-economical factors including Morocco's low literacy rate and the low and ineffective distribution of newspapers."