While printed newspapers in the US and Europe are fighting for survival in the face of a drop in sales and advertisin, it's an odd fact that circulations worldwide - including the Middle East - are still increasing.

What's more, while newspaper advertising in the west is unlikely to fully recover, even as the effects of the credit crunch fade, newspapers in the Middle East can look forward to continued growth in advertising.

At least, that is what Eamonn Byrne, business director of WAN-IFRA told the Arab Free Press Forum in Beirut yesterday, and I have no reason to doubt his word.

At the same time, the forum heard of various Arab newspapers that have come under pressure or even been force to close because of advertisers' boycotts (usually for political reasons).

Independent newspapers are especially vulnerable to these boycotts because they usually depend on a very small numberof big-spending advertisers. Byrne produced some interesting statistics to show that developing a large base of smaller-spending advertisers is a better way for papers to secure their future while also making them less vulnerable to boycotts.

Since Arab publishers are less worried by falling circulation than those in the west, they are also less inclined to put effort into developing their websites, which in many cases simply reproduce the content of their print editions.

I think they are missing a trick here. The forum's afternoon session heard journalists' complaints about problems with access to information - and this is an area where the internet could help. When information is difficult to obtain, crowd-sourcing via their websites could be a useful route to explore.

I was also struck by the reluctance of publishers to join forces when faced with threats to their freedom (too many rivalries, probably).

In Morocco, for example, discussion of the royal family i and trying to break. The trouble is that they get picked off by the authorities in ones and twos each time they try to do something.

It seems to me that the best hope of a breakthrough, next time there's a story about the king, would be for all the independent papers to publish it simultaneously. The government would then have to choose between suppressing all of them or none.