UNB :
Bangladesh Sangbadpatra Shilpa Parishad, an organization of newspaper owners, placed a 14-point demand including the payment of all outstanding advertisement bills owed to newspapers by government agencies, including Department of Films and Publications (DFP), by next June.
If not, the leaders of this organisation and publishers warned of waging a systematic movement to realise their demands from next July.
The demands were read out during a regular meeting addressing the ongoing problems of the newspaper industry and its solutions at the Daily Industry newspaper office in Dhaka on Saturday with the organization’s president Dr. Enayet Karim in the chair.
General Secretary of the organization Yunus Sohag put forward the demands during the meeting.
The other demands included the formulation of policies for the equitable distribution of government advertisements including at least four Bengali and two English newspapers, ending price discrimination of government advertisements in English and Bengali newspapers, introducing government advertisement prices on online portals of registered newspapers, and increasing the rate of government advertisements based on market inflation.