Says He is Impressed With Public Reception

Mr Farouk Newlands, 35, a Sierra Leonean-born administrator and accountant, is the Managing Editor of the newly launched weekly sports magazine- Football Digest.

The 20-page colored magazine, which hits the newsstands sometime last week, has been well-received   in many quarters of the Gambian society.

Well, The Point’s reporter on Saturday sat down with Mr Farouk for a short chat and below are the accepts of their tete-a-tete. Please read on: 

Tell us why did you come up with Football Digest?

We saw the need for assisting and contributing to the development of football and sports in general in the country. As  football or sports is   rising   in The Gambia we saw the need to assist or be part of government’s partners in sports development and football in particular because the government cannot do it all by itself.

Football Digest seems to shake the media landscape of the country, what is your comment?

Frankly speaking, I am overwhelmingly impressed with the public reception of the magazine. We printed 1000 copies and within three days everything is demanded; that shows that there is a ready market for us.

You started coming out weekly, are there any plan afoot to come out twice in the week or daily?

In the meantime we would be publishing once in any week and we would be making sure that the news would cover all over Africa, the European football news. We want to assure our readers that they would be given update news in the Gambian Nawettan, Premiership, La Liga, the Italian Sports news and all over the world.

To get such a paper kick-start must involved huge capital, so who is funding Football Digest?

The sponsor of Football Digest is called Global Media and Global Media is being supported by Heritage Enterprise, which is a major distributor for Banjul Breweries and Gambega.

Are you optimistic that you will be able to stand the heat of the market, because …. ?

We foresee that we stay   in the market and the paper Football Digest will definitely be a sustainable project.  With the assistance of our sponsor Heritage Enterprise which is a household name in The Gambia we believe that in the not distant future Football Digest would also become a household name. However we are looking forward for football sponsors to join in partnership so that we can make Football Digest a household name in The Gambia.

What is your staff strength now?

At the present the bulk of our workers are freelance reporters but notwithstanding we can boast of having five staff on our payroll despite been a new outfit.

Thank you very much for granting us this interview

The pleasure is all mines. You are always welcome.