L’idée de La Nuit des amoureux est née un jour où Sameem Sadat, le PDG d’Arman FM ▻http://arman.fm, première #radio privée du pays (et la plus écoutée aussi), était coincé dans les bouchons en rentrant chez lui. Ville dessinée pour héberger 2 millions d’habitants, Kaboul totalise aujourd’hui plus de 4 millions d’âmes et plus de 650 000 véhicules pour des rues étri- quées conçues pour en accueillir seulement 30 000. (…) Sameem Sadat était dans sa voiture, laissant son esprit vagabonder, lorsqu’il a remarqué que “le type à côté de [lui] passait son temps à envoyer des SMS”, relate-t-il. L’homme d’affaires a constaté qu’il avait un sourire malicieux aux lèvres, comme s’il flir- tait avec son téléphone. Et il n’était pas le seul. La plupart des jeunes gens autour de lui étaient en train de chatter.
One of Afghanistan media’s biggest success stories in recent years has been on the broadcast side. In 2010, The New Yorker described Saad Mohseni, chairman of The Moby Group, as “Afghanistan’s first media mogul.” In addition to Afghan TV and radio holdings, Moby owns a record company, ad agency and production company, and it partnered with News Corp. on the Farsi 1 satellite network beamed into Iran.
The Mohseni family, which operated businesses in Australia before the war, received $2.7 million in #USAID grants to help launch their diversified media company. The company has claimed it takes in annual revenues of over $20 million, according to The New Yorker profile. In the launch of Arman FM and Tolo TV, USAID was the “biggest contributor” outside of the family, The New Yorker reported.
“Funding from organizations like USAID was crucial to our decision to invest in Afghanistan,” Zaid Mohseni, a director of Moby Group, said in an email to The Huffington Post. “We certainly had the will to do it, but the funding allowed the project to be feasible commercially. Without the USAID funding, we would never have made those initial investments in the media sector.”
Mohseni said that his family was told when they first received USAID funding “we should not expect further funding for that project and so we made sure that we made the business sustainable.” He noted that his brothers Saad and Jahid and sister Wajma all gained significant business experience in Australia before starting their company in Afghanistan.
“We also invested everything we had into the business,” Mohseni said. “All property assets and savings were liquidated to invest in our Afghan business. So we had no choice but to succeed.”
The Moby Group, which in 2010 launched Tolo News, the country’s only 24-hour satellite news channel, also owns channels focused primarily on entertainment, offering shows like "Afghan Star,” a version of “American Idol.” While the entertainment operation may be able to subsidize Tolo News to an extent, the news side did lay off some staff in the past year due to restructuring.
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/afghanistan-media-afghan-war_n_2574818.html
