Aboubakr Jamaï

Aboubakr Jamaï (; born 1968 in Rabat, Morocco) is a Moroccan journalist and banker, and was the publisher of the newspapers Le Journal Hebdomadaire and Assahifa al-Ousbouiya. In 2003, he was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Background Aboubakr Jamaï is the son of Khalid Jamaï, who was a well-known journalist who often clashed with King Hassan II and was imprisoned and tortured in 2012. he co-founded Upline Securities in 1993, Morocco's first independent investment bank conducting the first privatization IPO in Morocco. He also joined the Executive Secretariat of the Middle East and North Africa Economic Summit as a financial adviser in 1996.

At age 29, he moved into financial journalism, co-founding the Casablanca-based Le Journal Hebdomadaire, a French-language news weekly magazine, in 1997. As a model, Jamaï used the Spanish paper El País because of the way it had started as a weekly paper under Francisco Franco's rule before growing into a media conglomerate. In 1998, Jamaï co-founded its Arabic-language sister publication, Assahifa al-Ousbouiya, designed to appeal to a broader audience. Following another round of international protest—including a question about the banning from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the occasion of Youssoufi's state visit to Germany—the government relented, and the papers were once more allowed to print.

Other lawsuits followed, and by 2006, Jamaï's debts amounted to more than US$1.5 million in fines, damages, and back taxes. A cousin of Mohammad's, Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah, offered to settle Jamaï's legal debts, but Jamaï refused, saying that he would "prefer to force the regime to let the press alone or be exposed for silencing it". Jamaï then resigned from his papers and traveled to the US, where he was accepted at the Neiman Fellowship [LA1] at Harvard University. He returned to Morocco in 2009. On 16 February 2010, bailiffs arrived with a court order that the paper must cease publication. Jamaï announced to a crowd outside the office that he was leaving journalism, because "serious journalism has become impossible in Morocco today".

Lakome.com When the Arab Spring-inspired 2011 protests broke out in Morocco Jamaï began a web-based news service, Lakome.com. The site has a small staff and focuses on reporting political events throughout Morocco. By April 2011, it was the fourth-most-visited website in Morocco. "an annual recognition of courageous journalism". The following year, he spent a year at Yale University in the US as a Yale World Fellow. In 2005 he was named Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He was named a Nieman Fellow of Harvard University in 2007, and in 2008 he was awarded the Tully Center Free Speech Award, of the Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.

In 2010, the World Association of Newspapers awarded him its Gebran Tueni Prize, established in honor of the assassinated Lebanese editor and press freedom advocate of the same name. He was Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Robert Bosch Stiftung in 2013. In 2016, he was awarded the Leaders for Democracy Award, Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).