A man reads The Voice daily in Yangon on Monday. (AFP)

Yangon, April 1 (Reuters): Four private dailies hit the newsstands for the first time in almost 50 years in Myanmar today, but many others failed to appear, hamstrung by poor financing, archaic equipment and a dearth of reporters.

Sixteen dailies were granted licences by authorities, but only four were published.

The government-affiliated Union Daily, one of three dailies available free of charge, used financial clout to beat out competitors like D-Wave, the paper of Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), for which publication preparations are still underway. “All four papers sold out quickly today,” Kyi Kyi, a roadside book vendor, told Reuters.

“But it’s very hard to predict their future sales since three of them were distributed free of charge today and the remaining one was sold at 150 kyat ($0.17) per copy,”

Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government took power in early 2011 after the military dictatorship relinquished a half-century stranglehold on the former Burma. It embarked on media reforms as part of its democratisation programme in August 2012.

The three other newspapers distributed were the Voice Daily, Golden Fresh Land and The Standard Time Daily, all Myanmarese-language publications. Competitors were unwilling, or unable, to get their dailies into the hands of the public quite as quickly.

Distribution, poor infrastructure, outmoded printing equipment and staffing issues are some of the stumbling blocks for media organisations.