The next 20 years in the UAE and the Gulf will be decades of dramatic change as the population more than doubles, as individuals develop far more sophisticated requirements of their media, and as the media competition gets a lot tougher.
The technology will also be changing in ways that we have not even yet imagined, although maybe Harry Potter's newspapers with talking and moving pictures might give us a clue to how radical the change might be. However, a constant point in this ever-shifting world is that people will still be looking for information and news. This will allow editors (content managers, web masters and reporters, etc) to prepare content and make it accessible to the people.
The reason Gulf News managed to succeed during its first 30 years was that it learned to expect change, and to focus on its readers. This is easy to say, but has been very hard to achieve, and along with every media company in the world, Gulf News will have to work to spot which trends are important to the readers and users, and then work out how to service them.
Population surge
In 2008 the population of the UAE is very close to five million and is expected to double within the next ten to 15 years. This means that any UAE media company will have to rise to the tremendous opportunities created by this huge number of new people, as well as handling their increasing diversity of interests and requirements.
Men and women will be looking for a much more sophisticated delivery of information, comment and entertainment, and the only media operations that will succeed will be those that can keep up with the new demands of a 21st century population in the Arabian Gulf.
The scale of the expansion is hard to imagine, but the hard facts are clear: Dubai already has 1.5 million inhabitants (compared to 1.1 million in 2005), and expects to double to near three million within ten years. Abu Dhabi expects to get to more than three million people in 2020, from a present population of just under a million.
And these two leading emirates are not alone. All the five other emirates in the UAE are also embracing the trend of seeking larger populations from which to develop their future economic power and development.
Gulf nationals
All these new inhabitants will not just come from all over the world. For the first time in the history of the Gulf, the growth in people will include large numbers of young Gulf nationals. This extraordinary demographic shift is thanks to the tremendous birth rates of the past few years, helped by excellent health care, leading to a large new generation of Gulf nationals growing up to take their place as adults in the workplace.
All six GCC countries share a huge population surge as 65 per cent (on average) of the national population who were under 25 years of age in 2007 become something like 80 per cent who are under 35 within the next ten years. Their cultural and social position will be all-powerful. The few remaining Gulf nationals who are above 35 or 40 years old in ten years' time will not be able to force their wills on the young generation taking over.
And the new majority of Gulf nationals will know what they want. They will have been educated in their own countries, to international standards. They are already self confident and demanding individuals, who will not put up with second best. They are internationally aware, and are likely to be more liberal than conservative, while also remaining firmly Arab and Gulf in their cultural roots.
Their media needs will be a lot more demanding than their seniors. They are an internet-friendly generation, used to shaping their own media on the screen rather than having it drop onto the doorstep. Editors will have to be prepared to work with the new audience in the Gulf to maintain their interest. That means the young generation taking over will have to trust that what is being offered is relevant and informed, and the traditional media may not be where they will look for their primary source for news and views.
Matching that generation's search for content is the single major challenge facing most media companies in the Gulf. The ones that succeed will set the tone for the next 20 years, and the ones that continue to offer a mixed pack of content offered to the lowest common denominator will remain at the lowest end of the market and struggle to survive.
Many channels
Media around the world is wrestling with the internal organisational challenge of adapting to a world in which people are not limited to the traditional media for their news and information needs. For many years, media companies have operated through three channels of dissemination: print titles such as newspapers and magazines, radio stations, and TV stations. People got their news, entertainment and information from one channel or the other, but now they are looking wider afield.
It is not right to call the internet a new channel, since it has become so ingrained in most people's media. However, most media companies are still working out how to make the best use of the medium. It has transformed the way people access information, make comments, and how they connect with their peers. The immediacy of the web, and its global reach, has transformed the way people look at content. Everyone has to work to a global standard.
In addition, the web allows users to control their own editorial feed, which means the role of the editor is no longer to choose what people will read or see, but rather to appeal to the users and try to attract them to use their site or content.
Where people find their content is changing dramatically. People are no longer limited to morning coffee with a newspaper, or the TV news just after supper. Through laptop computers, mobile phones, and the convergence of all these handheld devices, people are getting used to finding exactly what they want, at any time, in any place. This is particularly so in the Gulf, where internet and mobile penetration is among the highest in the world and the new generations are totally at ease with the digital world on offer. This means any media company cannot ignore their requirements, and has to be able to offer content into the multi-media world we live in today.
Gulf News as a newspaper hasalready embraced the new challenge with gusto, as the numbers show. It already sells the largest number of copies of any newspaper in the Gulf, and its website, gulfnews.com, attracts more than 1.3 million unique visitors a month. But this is only a start, and in the future Gulf News will have to offer closer integration of its news gathering with the variety of different media, including print, web, film and radio.
Speed versus context
This all makes for a substantial difference in the working day. For example: when a major fire broke out one morning at 7am, the traditional newspaper would rush reporters and photographers to gather information, and then would have to spend some hours planning the best choice before the evening deadlines for the printed copies to be delivered the next day.
But in the multimedia world of today, there was a focused and immediate rush to get the urgent facts onto gulfnews.com and to Gulf News Radio as quickly as possible. The web and radio both needed to know what was happening. This means Gulf News as a multimedia operation has had to address how to handle the different demands of creating the written word for the web, and the spoken word for radio, which are two totally different skills. To provide both is a major training challenge for Gulf News, in common with most other large news organisations worldwide.
The web is also hungry for pictures, and much of the early content will probably come from readers who happen to see the news, and pass it on to the newspaper. Some of the world's best news pictures, full of life and drama, are taken by passers-by who happen to be in the right place at the right time, and have their digital cameras or mobile phones at the ready, and pass on the images.
The role of the printed newspaper is to use the next few hours to take the story a stage further for the reader on the following morning. The newspaper needs to answer questions such as: Who caused it? Why did it happen? Is there an investigation? Is there any government comment, etc? Is it important?
Breaking news on radio and internet is a matter of raw facts: there is a fire, there is a bomb, someone has resigned, etc, and the digital communications media are full of such immediate facts.
Rather than supplant the newspapers, the digital rush to immediacy has strengthened newspapers' role, which is to give more detailed and reasoned reporting, make sure the stories include more explanation and context than the breaking news can do.
Diverse population
Looking ahead, the larger UAE population will mean many more small groups of people with shared special interests will be able to form more than they have done in the past. These larger numbers of people will offer more variety in their interests ranging over a huge area of civil life, all of which offers specific publishing opportunities.
The list of such groups is endless: There may be a support group for parents of children with Down's Syndrome, and they may need to share information among each other and also get their message across to the wider community. An environmental action group will want to publish what it knows in order to raise awareness of the issues it is pushing.
Emiratis sharing an interest in traditional poetry will want to have a medium through which they can publish their work for other poets to appreciate, so that it circulates to their whole community and becomes part of the wider social fabric.
The power of all this social activity means that the old ‘one size fits all' newspaper will have to change. News will become more targeted at the different groups, and newspapers will start to diversify as they follow their different target markets. Some will be in favour of the quick read, others more interpretive; some will be more reader-focused and others more event-led; some might target specific ethnic groups and others might aim at certain economic strata of people.
In addition, the media targeted at the specialist interests will become strong enough to offer competition to the newspapers. Such competition might take all sorts of forms: TV listings in a newspaper will face competition from TV magazines; sports pages will have to compete with the alternate offerings from the internet with its more immediate results and the TV with its moving images of real action, the cultural pages will have to rival the magazines from the intelligentsia.
Community
One of the most powerful shifts in media worldwide, which affects the UAE as much as anywhere, is the need for media organisations to interact and involve its readers. This is not just about newspapers publishing readers' letters, but they are bringing their readers into the newsroom itself.
The websites can offer real-time comment and interaction between readers and the experts in the newsroom, commenting on events, with the media company acting as an intermediary between the individual and the news-making organisations.
TV stations now routinely include bulletins referring to the websites, and stories visited by the most viewers. This has a profound effect, since the most important story ceases to be what the news editors think it should be, but it becomes what the people want it to be.
While this has the beauty of opening news to the people's wants, it also has the ugly side of feeding people's prejudices and allowing people to choose to remain ignorant of what might be important, and to focus on what they want, regardless of how it might be irrelevant or sensationalist.
But allowing for this danger, community journalism is here to stay and is one of the most important trends to emerge in years. Readers now routinely send in pictures of events, offer comments and opinions, all of which is becoming part of the news mix, also giving news organisations a massively increased reach with thousands of new people contributing to the news gathering business.
Where is the newsroom?
One of the most important changes in the UAE market that will have to come at some time is the breaking of the newspapers' dominance of control over the news agenda. At present, in the UAE and most Gulf states, only newspapers maintain a full team of reporters who can go and find news, and news editors who can manage that process.
Nearly all TV and radio stations have tried to save money and as a result do not have their own full news gathering operations. As a result, their news bulletins have to quote the morning newspapers or offer some sort of informed comment on stories in the papers. Websites in the UAE have the same problem, and while many are very good digests of what has been printed by others, or very informed blogs, none has yet succeeded in becoming an authoritative source for news without the support of a print title behind it.
This situation means that many news media organisations have become slack about reporting the news, since they get used to reporting what others have said. The danger is that they have little idea about the disciplines of news reporting, and even less about the political implications of their reporting, and consequently wander into difficulty.
But more importantly if an organisation does not have its own reporting, it cannot control its news agenda. As a result it gets used to reproducing what others have written, be that another news organisation, or any other institution such as a government department or commercial company that chooses to make announcements, so setting the news agenda in its favour.
The heart of a strong newsroom is the ability to decide what is important and what is not. To have the institutional ability to make this judgment is a vital prerequisite for any serious news organisation, whatever the medium it uses to move its content out to the viewers/users/readers.
In time, different kinds of media will develop in the UAE, and will adapt the newsroom disciplines for their own specialist requirements, meeting needs of their readers or viewers. When this happens, the UAE will get a truly deeper range of news on offer to its public, and the newspapers will then really face some genuine competition.
