… Faces Shut Down
Time is running out for the Management of New Times Corporation publishers of the Ghanaian Times to salvage the pro-government newspaper, from total collapse.
This is because the paper is wallowing in debt making it practically difficult to even foot its weekly production cost.
Reeling under huge debt, the Ghanaian Times which was formerly printed by Graphic Communications Group is currently being printed by Western Publications Limited, a private commercial printing firm belonging to the publishers of Daily Guide.
This company, belonging to the immediate past National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party, Freddie Blay and his wife Gina Blay, Ghana’s Ambassador to Germany, charge GH¢2.80 per printed copy of the newspaper.
This situation compelled the management of the Newspaper to reduce its pages from 32 to 24 but that made no impact on its ever-rising cost of printing.
As if that is not enough, Ghanaian Times has no reliable vehicle to transport the printed papers from the printing press to the outstations for sale to its customers.
For this reason, circulation of the paper to regions like Ashanti, Western, Eastern, Volta, and Northern among others has been left to the mercy of commercial drivers who also deliver the papers at the outstations very late.
This has bloated the returns margins of the papers making nonsense of the company’s desperate attempts to recoup its investments.
Interestingly, as a means of finding closure to the problems bedevilling the fortunes of the paper, the management agreed and constituted a group of people to embark on a journey to India to shop for a printing machine.
Years on after the trip, there has been no sign of any printing machine.
The old printing machine has also been sold as scraps.
The newspaper was formerly known as the Guinea Press Limited, established by the late President Dr Kwame Nkrumah in 1957, as a printing press for The Convention People’s Party.
However, after his overthrow in a military coup in 1966, The Guinea Press was taken over as state property by the National Liberation Council Decree 130 of 1968.
