Cairo  - At a time when newspapers around the world are falling on hard times, Egypt's august al-Shorouq publishing house did something few would have expected: it launched a new, independent daily.

"When the first issue of al-Shorouq newspaper is circulated, the reader will get a different taste of modern journalism," Salama Ahmad Salama, a respected Egyptian columnist and now head of al-Shorouq's editorial board, promised the readers in his opening editorial on Sunday.

The upstart daily on Saturday heralded its arrival the following day by taking out full-page ads promising "in-depth analysis" and "unbiased coverage" on the back pages of al-Ahram and al-Akhbar, the country's two leading government-owned dailies.

Ali Hamza, a 39-year-old Cairene who reads several newspapers a day, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that when he first heard of the new venture by publishing giant Ibrahim al-Mualim, who owns al- Shorouq, one of the Arab world's most largest and most respected publishing houses, he was keen to buy a copy of the paper as soon as it hit newsstands.

After seeing the first edition, Hamza said, his first impression was: "The layout is a bit staid and the headlines are not so striking."

This, said Hani Shukrallah, an experienced editor who has also joined al-Shorouq's editorial board, was exactly what the paper had in mind.

"We are not looking for a striking or sensationalist layout as most Egyptian newspapers do," Shukrallah told dpa. "We are trying to put in place higher and more modern standards of journalism in Egypt - both in form and content."

Shukrallah said that the paper, by distancing itself from the sensationalist, screaming headlines so common among Egyptian newspapers, would be "seeking the unbiased truth while keeping the codes of journalism in its highest standard."

Hamza, one of the first readers to see the newspaper, said he was impressed by the diversity of columnists represented on the paper's opinion page.

"The opinion writers run the gamut from the right to the left, with a healthy dose of independent thinkers represented as well. This is definitely an advantage of the paper," he said.

Gamil Matar, who sits on al-Shorouq's editorial board, cited the variety in the names and political affiliations of the paper's writers as proof of the paper's "unrestricted liberalism and commitment to freedom of expression."

Matar, a former diplomat and politician, told dpa that he joined the paper to be able to play a role in "a needed reform of all social and political powers in Egypt."

In particular, he said, he hoped the paper would "get the Egyptian citizen, long drowned in his day-to-day problems, to be more aware of and more involved in domestic and foreign political issues."

Observers at other newspapers had doubted that Sunday's launch would come. Al-Shorouq repeatedly failed to get a license from the government to begin publishing over the course of six months.

Some journalists at other newspapers, watching al-Shorouq's troubles getting a license with perhaps a hint of spite, said that the paper's early difficulties presaged future restrictions on its criticism of the government, that the government wanted to send a message that it would be closely monitored and that off-limits issues would not be tolerated.

The paper's editors told dpa that they never doubted the paper would get a license. Shukrallah noted that five government ministers attended the paper's launch celebration last week.

Shukrallah said that even if the government intended to send a warning early on, he believed authorities soon learned that the paper "was not aiming to instigate officials or trap them. They now know that we cover state news as much as we cover the opposition, so they can rest assured that we strictly follow the codes of journalism."

Mahmoud Khalil, a professor of journalism at Cairo University, told dpa that he hoped al-Shorouq would live up to its stated aims.

"In many cases, the pro-government newspapers have become more royal than the king in their defence of the regime," he said. "And the opposition papers and most of privately owned press are critical to the extent of trading insults with government journalists.

"The result," he said, "is that a lot of readers have abandoned both." (dpa)