DUSHANBE, August 28, 2010, Asia-Plus  -- The first edition of Imrouz-News (Imrouz means “”today” in Tajik) will appear in Dushanbe today.  It will be the first daily newspaper in Tajikistan since independence.

“There are no daily newspapers in Tajikistan; someone’s got to be first and I decided that I will be able to do this,” the Imrouz-News editor Rajab Mirzo said in an interview with Asia-Plus.

According to him, publication of newspaper is a commercial project, and therefore, publishers pursue aim to make this project profitable along with providing residents of Tajikistan with daily news.  The first edition consists of four pages, but the number of pages will be increased in the future.

Rajab Mirzo noted that 80 percent of reporters working for the newspaper are new arrivals in Tajikistan’s journalism.  “They have been trained for along time in working with daily newspaper, because Tajik journalists have got out of the habit of work with dailies over the past twenty years,” the editor said.

On the sources of financing, Rajab Mirzo says no one structure has relation to publication of this newspaper, and to publish the newspaper the founder (the company of the same name) has taken loan from one the country’s banks.

In the meantime, according to the statistical data from the Ministry of Culture, some 20 new publications have been registered in Tajikistan in recent months.  Among them are weeklies Olamafrouz , Iqbol , Shikorchi , Payvand , Zaminsoz , Haqiqati Sughd and so forth.  The majority of them are the specialized publications.