Al Yaum (newspaper)
Al Yaum (Arabic: اليوم; The Day) is a pro-government Arabic daily newspaper based in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. It started in 1965 as a weekly eight-page magazine and became a daily newspaper in 1978. It is owned by Dar Al Yaum for Printing and Publishing and is published in broadsheet format with 28 color and black-and-white pages. The paper mainly covers news from the Eastern Province, especially Dammam, and also reports regional and Gulf-wide news, sports, and social issues. It is the leading newspaper in the Eastern Province and is distributed across the Persian Gulf region.
Editor-in-chief has included Sulaiman Aba Hussain (current), with past editors such as Hamid Ghuyarfi (until 1981, dismissed for criticizing the government), Othman Al Omeir, and Muhammad Abdallah Al Wail.
Al Yaum has earned regional honors, including being the first in the Middle East to obtain an IFRA ISO certificate, the first in the Middle East to win the IFRA Asia Award for best in print, and to join WAN-IFRA's Star Club and Color Quality Club. The paper has also faced suspensions and arrests of its correspondents; in 1982 a reporter was detained for two years and the paper was suspended that year because its literary supplement was popular with progressive leftist writers linked to Communist and socialist groups.
Circulation grew from 6,000 copies in 1975 to about 80,000 in 2003 and 135,000 in 2007.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 04:03 (CET).