The 43-year-old daily had gone into remission a few times with repeated infusions of funds from assorted patrons when faced with bankruptcy, but succumbed to the Grim Reaper hovering over the country’s print media on December 31, 2016. “The nation without Assafir“ was that day’s headline above a cartoon of a tearful dove (part of the paper’s logo) and a broken pen.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for staffers who hadn’t been paid in over a year like hundreds of counterparts in other newspapers, and as the industry goes into a dizzying free-fall. Although founder and editor-in-chief Talal Salman had announced his intention to close shop in 2016, he reversed his decision and kept limping along until he said it was too costly to keep the paper going.

Last year he also said he’d lay off about 50 staffers and cut journalists’ hours to allow them to look for other jobs but they threatened to stage a sit-in fearing they’d lose benefits by working shorter shifts. “This is where I learned the letter, the profession and the soul of journalism, and still do,” wrote veteran reporter Saada Allaou nostalgically in the special issue recalling her modest beginnings in an impoverished northern town and her move to Beirut where she had studied journalism and longed to join Assafir’s ranks.

The paper had reinforced her leftist credentials, Arabism, and support for the Palestinian struggle, she added. Salman had launched Assafir in 1974 as a platform for pan-Arab nationalist causes, with Egypt’s late leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as his role model, and remained its editor-in-chief until its demise. Its motto was “The Voice of the Voiceless.”