Dubai: The Dubai Press Club is all set to launch the third and most comprehensive edition of the Arab Media Outlook, a ground-breaking report on the state of the media in the Arab world and future projections for the next five years.
Titled Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013: Inspiring Local Content and slated for release in February 2010, the new edition promises to provide an extensive analysis of the media scene across the different platforms.
It will provide a country by country assessment of the media in 15 Arab countries and an assessment of the creation and dissemination of local and regional content.
In a statement released on Sunday, Mariam Bin Fahd, executive director of the Dubai Press Club, said: "The [report] this time also includes for the first time the results of extensive market research in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon on the changing dynamics of media consumption.
"In addition to the market research, the new [report] is based on a rich corpus of data gleaned from elaborate interviews with around 130 prominent media organisations across all platforms from all covered markets — Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, the UAE and Yemen."
She drew attention to the fact that the report is coming out over a year-and-a-half after the global financial downturn hit the region, allowing for reflections on the impact of the crisis on the region's media industry. The previous edition was released at the onset of the crisis.
"The report offers valuable insights into the perception and consumption of [the] media in the region as well as the ways in which media groups proactively respond to the after-effects of the global financial crisis," she added.
"For instance, 59 per cent of the stakeholders interviewed remained optimistic regarding the prospects of the media industry in the region in 2010 in spite of the unsettling effects of the downturn.
"Corresponding to this optimism are the findings on local content consumption from the market research, which showed that over 60 per cent of the respondents in the region prefer to browse Arabic websites and 80 per cent prefer to watch TV in Arabic, belying fears of the invasion of foreign media in the Arab countries."
