244 Mediated Publics
steps were taken in an effort to engage people of modest financial means
as well as nonurban and nonliterate groups. For example, a proposal was
recorded in the fall of 1908 to establish regular institutionalized reading
nights, where an “educated Arab” would read the newspaper in a central
location, for the benefit of the masses that could not read.^27 Furthermore,
the newspaper Falastin sent copies of its paper to each village in the region
with a population over one hundred, with the aim to “open the paper
before the fellahin [peasants] first of all to provide information about what
was happening in the empire, secondly to inform them of their rights.”^28
Making Ottoman citizens
Thus, with a conscious awareness that their readership was both chang-
ing and expanding, these pioneering newspapers went about shaping
Ottoman citizens. The Ottoman citizenship project was twofold: defining
who was an “Ottoman,” and both implicitly and explicitly educating these
new Ottomans on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The mul-
tilingual Palestinian press weighed in on the revolution and its immediate
effects (the constitution, parliamentary elections) as well as the longer-
term meanings and impact of Ottoman citizenship: equality between the
empire’s religious and ethnic groups, relations between the governing class
and the governed, changes such as universal military conscription, and the
role of a reformed Ottoman Empire in the world. Furthermore, as we shall
see, citizenship practices were daily inscribed on the pages of the press.
e fact that most of the newspapers owed their existence to the Th
favorable political conditions set in place by the Young Turk revolution
was duly acknowledged by the conscious adoption of pro-Ottomanism
espoused by the young newspapers. Many of the new papers declared
their affiliation with the revolution and its values by their carefully chosen
names: Progress, Equity, Liberty, Constitution, The Voice of Ottomanism,
Freedom. Other papers opened with a declaration of intent from the edi-
tor, expressing to their readers their commitment to contributing to the
efflorescence of a civic identity in the empire that would embrace the
principles of the revolution on the one hand, and push the empire forward
towards a glorious future, on the other. In this, they were both echoing the