Ve Middul Eeste Pee Aar Awordes

Beavis and Butt-Head via last.fm

There's something slightly worrying about a room filled with over 500 PRs. It's a happy zone, tides of positivity washing against the walls.

The 'practitioners' are all chatting away happily, a tumultuous babble, but I'm sitting at a table of journalists, the usual criminals of the Middle East's marketing media waiting for someone to fall so they can eviscerate them, their jaws slavering at the very thought and evil grins stretched across their drink-sodden faces.

The MC is shouty, trying to get people to stop talking. You'd have thought that 500 people talking together and sharing experience, best practice and all that was what MEPRA was all about, but apparently not. She's screaming STOP TALKING YA YA YA at us and slowly people get the message.

We're good at crafting and communicating messages, but getting them is not quite our forté, apparently. Ya ya ya.

American people shouting at me reminded me, for some reason, of watching the news on CNN...

The MC and various types gathered on the stage to pass over awards to a bunch of PRs. Some bloke from HSBC made some lacklustre (well, he'd hardly sparkle, would he?) jokes about the collective noun for PR people - a flock of flaks, apparently.

Any contributions in the comments about the collective noun for HSBC employees would be appreciated. I though perhaps a dribble of d... well, never mind. Yayaya.

By now, the press are restive. The jerks of drumroll tape that occasionally peppered events was starting to get its reward, bursts of malign laughter from the hock of hacks around me. I've heard that type of laughter before, at a performance of Othello at The National - Felicity ("Felicity, Felicity, you fill me with electricity", according to Ade Edmonson at his loquacious finest) Kendal as Desdemona bursting satisfactorily out of a Nell Gwynne dress while Paul Scofield hammed it up so badly that Othello's soliloqy to his dead lover drew gales of the stuff from the audience.

This was nasty laughter, the laughter of the cut-purse about to make his move as he stalks the dark, wet streets of Elizabethan London.

The worst of them is Allison, his faux-genteel Edinburgh accent masking his guttersnipe urges, egged on by AdNation's vile Elliot ('the Bear') Beer, the two of them cackling like Beavis and Butthead as they scan the audience of hapless wannabe winners for victims. And then Allison's off, leaving his voice recorder on the table behind him so that it can pick up any snippets of gossip about him while he's absent. He's ducking and diving in the crowd, picking up quotes and snippets of snark, digging for dirt like a pig rooting out Perigord truffles, while the MC says 'ya ya ya' for the umpteenth time. I think she believes it makes her sound Arab, but it comes across as somehow more Maureen Lipman.

It's all too much. I clap maniacally for Peyman Parham as he picks up the final gong, 'Communicator of the Year', with a genuine feeling of enormous relief - Sarah would have spent the next 365 days referring to me as 'Gob of the Year' and thanks to Peyman I have bilked that dire fate. Now we could go drinking, but instead we spend hours wandering around the labrynthine Habtoor Grand Hotel in search of a bar that would accept men dressed in kandouras. What a joke - teetotal hosts that aren't allowed to join their friends in a bar. Eventually, exhausted by wandering aimlessley down the charmless marble corridors, we find a smoky joint that's a ten second walk from the place we were thrown out of. It turns out that the toilets are actually over in the forbidden bar.

Which is, I'm sure a metaphor for something.

As we celebrate Peyman's win, I'm filled with a strange sense of unease. And then I realise it's because the press aren't with us. That's a bad thing - it means they're holed up in some dark, foreboding garret 'writing up' the evening.

I fear the worst...

The Arab Media Awards Changes

Image by sebFlyte via Flickr

Changes have been announced to The Arab Media Awards, a move that at least partly explains the stream of decidedly odd tweets emanating from the Dubai Press Club Twitter handle yesterday.

According to reports today, the awards are going to change to take more account of online media and young professionals. The inclusion of young journalists has been accomplished by adding a new award for, wait for it, 'Young Arab Journalist'.

As for online, the new focus for the awards, recognising the tectonic shifts that are shaking the world of print media around the world, has been accomplished by removing the word 'print' from the name of the awards.

If the story is complete, then there's no new award or category of awards for online journalism. Just the removal of the word 'print'...

So that's it. That's the evidence that these awards now recognise online journalism and which justifies Gulf News' headline, "Revamped award to cover all aspects of journalism".

Incompetence or arrogance?

Image by Loutron Glouton via Flickr

Respected security analysts and consultancies have now confirmed what many industry watchers, pundits and commentators suspected last week - that the 'upgrade' pushed to tens of thousands of BlackBerry mobile devices in the UAE by telco Etisalat was, in fact, not what it seemed to be, an 'upgrade for Blackberry service. Please download to ensure continous service quality.'

Interestingly, this rather flies in the face of the somewhat belated statement made by the telco itself, which I reproduced in full here at the end of last week. That statement rather annoyed a number of BlackBerry users who found it facile and lacking the one element that tens of thousands of frustrated customers whose mobile devices were affected wanted to see - an apology. Many of those users say their BlackBerrys were rendered inoperable or suffered significantly downgraded performance. A number reportedly bought new batteries for their BlackBerrys, believing the battery was at fault when, in fact, it was the software update they had accepted from the operator.

A press release was issued on the 15th July by security company SMobile Systems. The company, which positions itself as 'the leading provider of security solutions for mobile phones and maker of the only antivirus and antispyware applications in the world for BlackBerry devices, has released a solution for the (in their words) 'recent spyware-laden update sent out to BlackBerry users on the Etisalat network'. That press release in full can be found here.

The company's release claims, 'The BlackBerry Spyware, which intercepts email and drains battery life quickly, was pushed as an update to BlackBerry's on the Etisalat network. Sent to users as a wide-area protocol (WAP) message, the Java file intercepts data and sends a copy to a server without the user's knowledge.'

That is an extraordinary claim to make regarding a piece of software that Etisalat's official statement says was software 'required for service enhancements particularly for issues identified related to the handover between 2G to 3G network coverage areas.'

It is perhaps worth noting that the Chairman of SMobile Systems, quoted in the release, is a former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and so, we must reluctantly admit, carries some weight.

SMobile is not the only expert testimony that claims the notorious update is other than it seems. Besides the many people who believe that the Etisalat network is 100% 3G now and therefore does not present 2G to 3G cell handover problems, there are also a number who point out the fact that BlackBerrys haven't experienced cell handover issues for some time now - in fact, the only online references I can find to the handover issue date back to 2006.

Added to this, you have those who have examined the code - Qatar based programmer Nigel Gourlay was quoted widely in the initial coverage of the issue, but his assertions that the network update was in fact an attempt to install monitoring software have been backed up by respected security blog Chirashi Security - a white paper analysing the code in some detail, written by Sheran Gunarsekera, is linked here.

That white paper asserts that the code is a monitoring application. It also points out that the application was not properly implemented, pointing out that the application developers had not used any form of source code obfuscation - in other words, it shouldn't have been as simple to trace, upload and analyse the code as it in fact was. The code, according to the White Paper, is set up to hide itself from the user, attach itself to network events and report these to the service-provider's server and look out for control messages that enable interception of user messages. If enabled, the application will forward a copy of emails sent by the subscriber to the service provider's servers.

Damningly, the White Paper asserts that the code 'was not mature enough to be deployed. This is especially relevant if Etisalat planned to conduct full-scale legal interception on BlackBerry users.'

The Chirashi White Paper is scrupulous to point out that the application only forwards outgoing emails and not other message types and then only when the application has been enabled to do so - it does not report on emails by default. But it does make the point that the version of the interceptor software it analysed should not have been deployed - particularly not as part of a legal interception.

The White Paper also strays out of geekland into my domain when it asserts, in the context of requiring legal interception software to meet two criteria, to do no harm and to be thoroughly tested: 'A service provider should always be prepared for the worst. In case things do not work out as planned, there needs to be a dedicated PR team who is ready to step up and deal with the public. Users should not be lied to or ignored, they will accept it better if they know the provider is well within legal rights to perform such interception.' (The italics are mine, BTW)

Security company Veracode also analysed the upgrade last week, asking whether the fact that the implemented update contained both .jar and .cod versions was down to 'arrogance or incompetence?'. That's an area explored by a journalist from the region's leading telecommunications magazine, Comms MEA, here. Again, Veracode's Chris Eng reports that the clear purpose of the update, in his expert view, is to install a piece of software that, when activated, will forward user data to a third party server, presumably owned by the service provider.

All of this leaves me wondering quite what on earth Etisalat thought it was doing. And quite how our media is standing by and allowing Etisalat to simply claim that the great big elephant in the cupboard is in fact a pair of shoes.

Nobody I know has a problem with legal interception. I think most of us would recognise that it is highly desirable that the security agencies employed by our governments have access to the information they need in order to protect society in general. Those agencies are constantly monitoring network traffic, legally and within the charters and frameworks that govern their activity. We need them to be competent and we desperately need to believe in their competence and efficacy.

Similarly, we need to trust our telcos. As a commercial entity operating in a regulated and competitive free market environment, even the biggest telco has a duty towards its subscribers and a duty to tell the truth - not only to earn the trust of its customers, but to underpin the level of trust required by investors and multinational companies who wish to trade in that environment. Mendacity and silence are not good enough - people are still facing problems with their terminals even now because there has been no clear attempt to reach out to customers and fix this issue - let alone roll back the update. There are critical issues related to privacy and security that the operator has refused to address - and questions are now being asked by a wider community about the long-term implications for BlackBerry security in general as a result of this whole farago.

Finally, there is the issue of responsibility. Someone was responsible for this Keystone Cops attempt to police BlackBerrys and the subsequent lack of timely and appropriate response that turned a customer service problem into a full-blown case study in how fumbled issues management rapidly evolves nto crisis management and how ignoring a crisis simply, in today's commercial environment, won't do.

Trust

Image via Wikipedia

Many journalists working for 'traditional' or 'mainstream' media have been arguing about social media, particularly Twitter and its lack of dept, context, analysis or comment. There's also an argument that social media platforms (blogs, Twitterings, Wikis, Forums) don't necessarily derive the truth in quite the balanced and reliable way as a trained journalist.

There's a counterpoint to that, with respected journalists taking to online like whale sharks to aquariums and aiming to apply the (admittedly somewhat idealistic) standards of journalism to that environment. I'd argue it's easier for journalists to do that - and do it well - because online doesn't put the same pressures of proprietorial, commercial and reputational restrictions on the practice of the profession as 'traditional' media such as newspapers do.

The argument that we need journalism to filter the raw content out there is a seductive one, but it sadly flies in the face of increasing evidence that the filters are broken - and that we are actually happier filtering the stuff we are interested in ourselves. That's doesn't necessarily mean we want to filter everything ourselves, just the stuff we're interested in. And the more interested we become, the more it becomes apparent that the filters aren't quite what they're claiming to be.

Here's a great example. Emirates Business 24x7 today reports that 'Emiratis go online against Harvey Nichols'. Now, for those of you wot doesn't know, UK top-end retailer Harvey Nichols has been accused of putting a t-shirt on sale that depicts a bulldog standing on a UAE flag.

This is not generally considered to be a clever thing to do - in fact, whoever authorised putting the damn thing on sale should be considered dangerously incompetent and, at the least, keel-hauled.

"Emiratis have organised a campaign on Facebook and Twitter to boycott Harvey Nichols in response to an offensive T-shirts for which they were also pulled up by the authorities." trumpets EmBiz24x7, albeit in an unconscious echo of Churchill's famous "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put"

The story is clear, no? There's a significant grassroots movement of furious Emiratis against the retailer. Except the story, suspiciously, doesn't quantify 'the movement'.

In fact, when we look beyond the headline, and the story underneath it, EmBiz24x7's story is stood up on a Facebook group of 21 members with 2 wall posts. I can't find any evidence of a concerted campaign on Twitter, searching for Harvey, Harvey Nichols and HarveyNichols - and there are no Tweets bunched under #HarveyNichols, while the #UAE hashtag features no Harvey Nicks but quite a bit of Etisalat's BlackBerry PR triumph.

In fact, the reader is not given the information to make up his/her own mind about the relevance, force or weight of this online campaign. Given access to that information (for instance, the data I have surfaced in this post) we'd all file the story (wouldn't we?) under 'non story why are you wasting my time with this?' - the very filtering that is supposed to be taking place on our behalf, no?

Tags: Shoot. Foot. Self. Media.

Slim

Image via Wikipedia

As various posts over the past eight or so months have noted, Gulf News has been cutting back on the carbs and has dropped its weight from a rather turgid 1.3Kg in November 2008 to an average 640g in Feb 2009, a downward trend continued through May, which saw the paper taking up regular exercise and slimming down to an reasonably regular 540g.

It's been feeling lighter recently and I have generally resisted the mildly obsessive impulse to weigh it again, but today's edition felt noticeably more feather-like. And it is - thanks to my trusty weighing scale (the best Dhs19 I've spent at Lal's in a long time) I can report that today's GN is weighing in at 440g, something like a third of its original weight. I have to add the usual caveat - a Dhs19 scale is hardly capable of atomic accuracy.

I think we can all agree there's a trend here - it's hardly rocket science. The fact that the trend is continuing is a worry, though. GN has already apparently shed a number of journalistic jobs - albeit fudging this news with an example of corporate responsibility and transparency that should inform any company wishing to call the skeleton in the cupboard a 'new market opportunity'. Few will welcome the news of more to come.

Paris Hilton Dumb? Hell No!

It's going to be a long, hot summer, people. Not only do we have the tide of infinite-eyed yellow evil to contend with, popping up all over the place ready to embrace us in those little open arms (so that it can tear our throats out and feast on our livers), we've got a localised outbreak of Paris Hiltons.

Ably assisted by a number of drooling morons in our local media, Paris is going to be spending the next three weeks wandering around Dubaii looking for her BFF - Best Friend Forever. This has, somewhat predictably, polarised opinion. A number of people think that it's really amazing (huge, even) that she's here. A number of people are neutral or perhaps even mildly disgusted. And a large number of people are spitting bile at the shallowness of it all.

Chaque a son goute, as they say.

But Paris Hilton is a girl who knows how to create a brand, starting of course with Brand Paris - a global celebrity bandwagon that was launched on the back of the Internet success of a sleazy video. Her squeaky, valley-girl catchphrases (Everything's so, like, amaazing, huuge and hot) and outre dress sense have, hard as this might be to believe, been adopted by millions - including the good women of Latvia. She's famous and, as a result of that fame, she's wealthy - the Hello Kitty of celebrity.

She told media yesterday, mugging with Arabesque jewellery and dresses, that she wants to explore more Brand Paris, including perhaps a club or hotel. Well, we've got the Roberto Cavalli Club, why not the Paris Club?

She also told them she wouldn't discuss money. "That's tacky," she said.

Quite.

Is Mainstream Media DOOMED?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Does the fact that social media has been leading the coverage of the Iranian protests mean the end of MSM, or mainstream media?

My post yesterday attracted a couple of interesting comments from The National’s Jen Gerson and Insurgency Watch’s Christopher Allbritton. Both are highly respected journalists with ‘form’. Jen’s points also led to a thought-provoking post on her blog last night.

So, to continue the conversation, I thought it might be worth taking their points as a Q&A...

Tonnes of the #iranelection tweets were rehashed MSM coverage
A lot of people were retweeting links to MSM pieces, yes. But if you were following close or primary sources, you were also getting the voice of people on the ground. Some of those voices, incidentally, are suspect. You have to take care over who you’re following and how much salt you take with each report. The skill in that is little more or less than a journalist would use to balance sources – and I do think that many people today have a refined enough news sense and awareness of the Internet to be able to make those judgements by themselves. We're big boys and girls now...

Having said that, a guide to decent breaking news is no bad thing - there are a lot of people out there Tweeting links to things that engaged or amused them - and when you start including hashtags, you have a good contextual stream. If you follow the right people, BTW, you get a better editorial pick than if you follow less acute observers. The choice, you will see, is in who you choose to follow. Same with journalism, same with newspapers. I read Jen because I like her writing and find it insightful. I follow @catboy_dubai 'cos he's a pal and is amusing. I like @deafmuslim because she’s a great writer and quite potty – and challenges my view of things. I choose not to read Germaine Greer any more. I loathe the Daily Mail. My choice of, errr, 'media'.

The awesome pics are from wire services
Images from wire services? Yes, of course. They're the images that most Middle East newspapers will use because they haven't got their own snappers on the ground. So I'll take a Tweet of a Getty/Reuters pic today over waiting until tomorrow

But there were also a lot of important images that weren’t wire service stuff. Like this image, for instance, that struck me so much. BTW, at the moment itself I don’t think we’re looking at sourcing halfway decent images – we’re looking at witness report that tells the story. Quality is not the benchmark.

Verifying information doesn’t mean waiting for a second Tweet. It means calling round sources or being an eyewitness yourself.
Although I am, by dint of my own background as a journalist and writer, minded to agree, I also think we’ve moved on a little. While there is undoubtedly room for sober, reflected, contextual analysis (something we see all too little of, BTW, in our regional media as well as international media) there is also room to take the stream of eye-witness report and form a view from that. If you’re seeing 30-40 people on Twitter saying that police are hitting the rioters hard and then getting Tweets detailing injuries, the flow of events would tend to suggest a measure of reality coming from the ground. Combined with real-time reports from newswires or other sources, you’ve got the story in front of you, but the story presented in a way that no broadcaster can equal – eye witness accounts of events unfolding, real people, real emotion, real reaction.

I do think that MSM often fails to meet that standard of journalistic integrity, BTW. Again, particularly in our region, good, balanced reporting that takes the facts, challenges them and searches for balance, completeness and the three sides to the story (yours, mine and the other guy’s) is often notably lacking.

Disinformation is a problem with crowdsourced media
Agree – because you’re actually in the crowd and so you’re as prone to each new rumour and report that’s coming through. Which is why, going back to your first point, it’s vitally important that we DO have people like Reuters and AP on the ground. Or people like yourself or Christopher. But that’s journalism, not media. I have RSS feeds of the major newswires and get the stories as they break. So I can verify the big stuff – which gives credence to the little stuff. And so I can quickly build a picture of which Twitterers are ‘on the money’ if I want to.

But this comes down to the point, I think. I don’t need CNN or Sky to see what’s happening – in fact, the whole #CNNfail thing was about thousands (tens of thousands) of people feeling strongly that CNN’s editorial judgement was deeply flawed in not affording these events top line coverage. I think many news outfits were unprepared, under-resourced and under-educated on the whole Iran story. So what's better, a young, unprepared cub journalist pitched into covering the Tehran story from the Dubai bureau, or witness reports from on the ground?

By the way, I will never forget seeing journalists in my hotel in Amman reporting 'from the Iraqi border' during the Iraq invasion. Not all journalism is bad, but the really woeful stuff has dented public faith in the credibility of journalism a great deal. And no, I don't like that at all.

Blogging triumphalists don't give us enough credit
I don’t much like the tag ‘blogging triumphalist’, you’ll probably be unsurprised to know. I and many, many other people I know feel that we are not being well served by ‘legacy’ or mainstream media. But it’s the media I’m talking about – not journalism. Journalism online can positively thrive, Christopher himself is a brilliant example of that and I’ll add my two personal favourites, AdNation’s Eliot Beer and mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows. Both are former print journalists who have taken their work online and who are part of a richer, faster, more agile and more diverse online media that are winning people’s eyeballs because they give us what we want, how we want it and when we want it.

The crucial difference is that we can select what streams interest us. We can follow the people whose work engages us, whether they’re bloggers, Twitterers, photojournalists, writers or videographers.

And, by the way, one of those streams is wire services – the very same ones that fill the majority of the white space on the dead trees that are shoved into the hotel rooms, houses and offices of disinterested readers all over the Middle East every day. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to read a watered down version of Reuters’ piece on Tehran, it’s on my desktop in two seconds thanks to RSS. And the pictures, too. AND the eyewitness reports that flesh out my own personal understanding of, and emotional attachment to, what's going on.

Twitter is one part of this emerging new media story, one of the information streams open to us thanks to the Internet. As consumers, we are increasingly using these information streams to customise and streamline the content we believe is relevant to us.

We don’t need translators or people to hold our hands and give us the context that we, poor mortals, are too dumb to seek ourselves. And if that’s journalism’s defence (I do not believe it should be, BTW), then God help journalism.

Iran Media Coverage Fail

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Watching Sky News over the weekend just reinforced my growing irritation with ‘traditional’ media. There’s a big bust up over budget caps in Formula One racing and Ferrari, among others, is playing hardball with F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone – a news item repeated constantly through the weekend. At no point did anyone explain what the bust up was actually about. The repetitive coverage of the same news file means we never drill down into the story and so I end up having to Google it to find out the answers to my obvious questions - the questions, incidentally, of journalism 101 - what, where, why, when, who, how?

Similarly, there’s no analysis of Mousavi’s role in the Iranian elections, no depth on offer at all, just a number of sound bites filmed with over-excited girls in hijab. And so I have to Google him, too, to get the background I feel I need to form my opinion.

By Saturday afternoon, I've given up watching repeats of Tim and Ashish and I’m getting my Iran election news from Twitter – a good selection of opinions, breaking news and links to better and more in-depth sources than Sky. I’ve not even got a Twitterfall going on it, that’s just the commentary from Tweeple. And the Iranians among them are sharing links to articles that reinforce and deepen my knowledge of the elections, widening my horizons and engaging my (I admit, unusually active) curiosity.

Amanda Knox is standing trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher. That one’s repeated again and again, but there’s no coverage of her actual testimony. Whatever happened to the boyfriend? Again, Sky ain’t telling. Googled.

So I'm getting my news analysis from search, from Twitter and from online news sources. And increasingly I'm getting my news from these sources, too. Because Sky, an important UK news provider, simply isn't giving me the news I want with the information, intelligence and drill-down I want.

Increasingly, I’m finding that my, and others’, curiosity is finding itself satisfied by online sources and not news media. Other people are asking the same questions and the answers are easier to find online through social sites, searching news sites, using RSS. I’m getting more depth of information, a broader reach of public opinion – both international and local to the event – and talking to people about stuff as it develops.

This morning there’s a new Twitter hashtag - #CNNfail – and it's a top 'trending topic' on Twitter, a reaction from thousands of people using Twitter who are learning more about the elections and subsequent riots there from Twitter than they are from CNN - which has been apparently failing completely to cover the entire process.

As traditional newspapers continue to struggle, many depending on newswires that consumers are perfectly able to read for themselves and unable to deliver the breadth of witness, comment and opinion available to us online, I do wonder how long it will be before we finish with this pointless journalism/bloggers debate and recognise that our news media is changing in a fast and fundamental shift that will wipe out many of the less agile players.

Gulf News. An Apology.

Image via Wikipedia

In its editorial today, Gulf News exhibits an amazing mixture of ignorance and arrogance. I'm really not sure which is greater.

The paper's rant, the second* most idiotic piece of editorial comment I can recall in 15 long years of regular GN readership**, asserts that French company Alstom is 'defying international law' - presumably because it is working with the Israeli government (GN's madcap scribble asserts 'by seeking financial gains at the expense of justice and peace') on the Jerusalem railway project.

The paper then goes on to say, of Alstom, 'It must reconsider its position, and so must regional states that deal with the French company.'

States like the UAE, for instance?

• The 2,000 megawatt $2 billion Fujeirah power plant contract awarded by the UAE in August 2007? Or the 16-year maintenance contract for that very same plant it signed in 2008?
  

• The February 2006 $250million Dubal power plant contract? Or the power plant and fume treatment contracts with Sohar Aluminium Company and ALBA (Aluminium Bahrain)?
  

• The August 2007 contract for a $175 million 150Megawatt co-generation plant at Dubai's aluminium smelter, DUBAL?
  

• The June 2008 award of a $500mn tram network in Dubai (together with consortium partners Besix and Serco)? The Al Sufouh tramway is apparently under construction.
  

In fact, the most cursory search of Gulf News' own website reveals a long history of huge contract awards to the company in the UAE and the wider Middle East, with key and strategic elements of transport, power, water and other public infrastructure being supplied and maintained by the company across the entire region.

So what's the answer here? Are we really being subjected to the ranting of simian, gibbering idiots - or is Gulf News knowingly misleading its readers as to the extensive and ongoing dealings which the UAE and other Middle East governments have with this major multinational company?

Does it owe its readers an apology for its ill-considered and badly researched coverage of this issue? Or an apology for being craven in its 'clarion call'?


* The most idiotic award still belongs to the holocaust denial piece, which seems to have been taken down from GN's website.

** Jeepers. That's over Dhs 16,000 at today's rates! I want a refund!

Alstom and the Saudi Rail Project Story

Image by michallon via Flickr

Gulf News' remarkable cover story today is that French rail company Alstom is coming under pressure from a range of advocacy groups lobbying Saudi authorities to withdraw from their award of the Makkah to Madinah railway project to the company. Those groups, including the PLO and the PA, are angered that Alstom is building a light rail network in occupied Jerusalem.

The page one lead story for some reason completely fails to mention that Alstom holds the contract for Dubai's Al Sufouh tramline. The contract, awarded by the RTA to the ABS consortium, is worth over $500 million, with Alstom claiming some $280 million of that value in the partnership with felow consortium members Besix and Serco (who, respectively, put the BS into ABS). In fact, it's one of a number of significant contracts that Alstom has won in Dubai and the Middle East region as a whole - Alstom is a major player in power generation, too.

The Dubai contract for the Citadis railway system is actually significant as it will trial a new air-conditioning system on platforms for the first time. Citadis has been installed in over 28 cities around the world, according to the company.

Gulf News merely mentions that the company is 'eyeing' business in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And yet the Alstom contract award, made in April 2008, is the first result you get by googling 'Alstom transport Dubai'.

How strange, is it not, that Gulf News' journalists missed that fact when researching such an important story?

(By the way, Alstom itself makes no secret of its work in Israel - in presentations such as this one, the company cites its work in Jerusalem as a case study. Like many other corporate companies around the world, Alstom works globally including projects in the Arab World and Israel. We do all know that hundreds, if not thousands, of corporates do this, don't we?)

Association to Stand Behind "Good Bloggers"

Well, it's official. Bloggers facing legal action will be protected by the UAE Journalist's Association if they abide by the ethical code of the association, wash behind their ears and are kind to small furry animals.

Mohammed Yousuf, the head of the Association, told Emirates Business 24x7's Dimah Hamadeh:

"Bloggers and "virtual" journalists have the right to be protected by the Journalists' Association, provided they abide by the ethics code, including stating of facts and sources of information, avoiding defaming without tangible proof, or provoking hostility arising from religious, sectarian or race discriminations."

Yousuf, displaying a remarkable lack of understanding regarding the 'online world', goes on to tell Hamadeh that audiences still mistrust online media, a lack of credibility that leads to online often being perceived as a channel for spreading rumours and destroying reputations.

Tell that to Arabianbusiness.com, Zawya.com and maktoob.com, will you? Or to the many, many people that intelligently sift online sources to arrive at an informed and wider picture than is often available through the 'traditional' media that Yousuf freely admits in the piece are subject to a greater degree of censorship than online media.

Yousuf tells Hamadeh (who must have been struggling to hold a straight face) that the Association's mission is to "invite bloggers and online reporters to adopt professional standards."

All this on the sidelines of a two-day event that invited bloggers from the UAE and around the region to discuss the role of new media and journalism. I didn't see anyone Tweeting from the conference and I don't know of any bloggers that were there. I certainly didn't get an invite (snif) - did you?

Isn't it funny that the UAE's bloggers NEVER seem to get invited to events where online and 'new' media are being discussed in... err... the UAE?

But I think we're missing quite a big thing in all this talk of protecting bloggers who abide by the ethical code of the UAE Journalists' Association.

Bloggers. Are. Not. Journalists.

The BBC's eminent Hossam Sokkari rather confounded the Arab Media Forum's Token Blogger, Algerian Issam Hamoud, by asking him if he had always wanted to be a journalist - as if being a blogger is something that can only be explained by a frustrated urge to journalism.

I know some excellent journalists that have become bloggers and some excellent journalists who blog alongside their more traditional, more papery, roles. And I know many excellent bloggers that are not, don't want to be and wouldn't dream of being journalists.

I do wish they'd get this into their heads! Bloggers. Are. Not. Journalists.

This is a new thing, not another face of an old thing. It follows new rules - and raises ethical questions and questions of practice that are not touched by old codifications of good journalistic practice.

While I'm sure the UAE Journalists' Association's offer is kindly meant, it's barking up quite the wrong tree.

UPDATE
This story in Gulf News today, that Saudi Arabia is mulling putting an electronic publications law on the anvil, is another and slightly more worrying take on this very topic. Take a look here.

Independent Article Blocked by Du?

This screengrab by pal Catalin (who normally captures images of a much more artistic nature) shows what the UAE's Twitterers have been confirming today - that UAE telco Du does, indeed, appear to have instituted a block of Johann Hari's skewed Dubai-bashing article in The Independent.

Hari's piece, considered by a great number of the people that live and work here as unbalanced and even egregious, was hilariously taken off by blogger and Sun person Chris Saul.

It angered many people, certainly had an impact and was arguably the zenith of the Dubai bashing pieces that have broken out in international media over the past few months like a rash of irritating little surface lesions. Many of these pieces were awful examples of 'Drive-by journalism', but Hari's certainly appeared to have been well researched, even if many of us disagreed with its hysterically outraged tone, wilful lack of balance and insistence on portraying Dubai in the worst possible light.

But we all had views on it, expressed widely and with vim and wit. The vast majority of people I know who live and work here disagreed with Hari's piece and did so from a standpoint of great experience of Dubai and the wider Middle East - the context in which Dubai demands to be placed by anyone genuinely wishing to provide service to their readers.

We were able to have that discussion because we could see what we were discussing. Chris was able to lampoon it so brilliantly because he had the chance to read what he was lampooning. Public voice provided a balance to Hari's article and also provided many of the balancing comments that disagreed with it on The Independent's website. Because we could see the piece, make our minds up and provide our counterpoint to Hari's rant.

Now Du has apparently blocked the article (see the grab above), at least in part (some Du users say they can still access it, although the majority appear not to be able to). If so, we can only urge the telco to reconsider this unilateral decision (Etisalat customers can still access it, so presumably this means the block is not a TRA decision) and reverse it.

I can only assume that it was a decision taken in error by some jobsworth and does not truly reflect a policy of blocking all material that reflects an opinion or tone that does not meet some hidden 'standard' of what's acceptable. Or that it is a technical 'glitch' that can be remedied.

But if it is a block based on the content of the piece, that's really bad news. It would deny people the right to an opinion. It would deny the practice of journalism. And it would have the potential to create yet more negative sentiment on Dubai - negative sentiment that I, for one, really and truly do not want to see being so needlessly created.

Anyone from Du able to confirm that this is not a block by policy?

Update

The National's Tom Gara reports, via Twitter, that the du block is to be removed and seems possibly to have been the subject of a little confusion between du and the TRA.

Good news, then, at the end of the day.

Sentiment on the The Arab Tweet

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I didn’t attend the ‘New Media’ session of The Arab Media Forum yesterday ( I served my time in the morning, alright?), but then I didn’t need to. Several people I respect were in the audience and were Tweeting highlights throughout the session. One of them was a colleague, one was another PR person I chat to and two were media people I know well.

I can wait for further analysis of the session, I can take my time. I got the high points, the headlines, as they happened – and from several different sources and viewpoints at that.

The people whose commentary on the proceedings was influencing hundreds, in fact going into the thousands, of people were not the ones on the stage talking at the Forum, they were in the audience. Between them, the Tweeters were talking to an audience of more people than the guys onstage with the microphones. Sure, the BBC will broadcast the session in a while – but we’ve already discussed it, deliberated it, shared it ‘on the record’ with the entire Internet and moved on.

And if that doesn’t give you pause for thought, I give up.

Incidentally, the Twitter users were likely the only people in the room full of hundreds of media people that knew, as they sat down to the session, that Roxanne Saberi had been released from the terrible, feared Evin prison in Tehran – that her father was actually on the way to pick her up at that very moment. The breaking news was flying around Twitter as the conference session started. Oh! And also the news that not only had the Pope called for a two-state solution in Palestine but that the Palestinian Authority press centre had been forced to shut down by the Israelis.

And it doesn’t take a newsroom of hundreds to do that. Or a ‘publishing house’. Or a ‘printing press’. Or an ‘editor in chief’.

Oddly, our little band of Twitterers probably represented the few people in the room that actually, genuinely cared about news like Roxanne Saberi and the PA media centre. Freedom is an Internet thing – the ‘old world’ is more reconciled to its lack.

So what did happen in the ‘new media’ session?

The 'traditional' media, debated their credibility and asked The Lone Blogger why he blogged ("Did you always want to be a journalist?"), comforting themselves with the fact that 'citizen journalism' wasn't as reliable as a 'real journalist'.

They, and Seymour Hersh, appear to have missed the point. The world is changing - it's not about bloggers wanting to be journalists. It's much, much bigger than that and it's time that many of our media woke up to the smell of coffee.

BTW, a Gulf News (600g) survey today, commissioned from IPSOS of some 2,000 people, showed that 76.2 of respondents strongly agreed with the statement 'The Internet helps me to keep up to date with the latest news'. GN's headline for the piece?

"Gulf News Stays Ahead of the Pack"

Which is fine, as long as your pack's not heading for the edge of a cliff...

The Arab Media Forum

Image by madmonk via Flickr

Today marked the start of the 8th Arab Media Forum. I'm quite fond of said forum, if only because it marked the start of this blog, back with this post which has always made me smile when I read it.

So I'm a simpleton. Get over it.

The keynote address at this year's gig was given by the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. He said a number of interesting things and, thanks to the simultaneous translation, a couple of slightly strange ones. There was one passage about dark oceans and creatures feeding on each other that had me slightly bewildered, but we soon found the track again.

(Offtopic, Moussa said that he was impressed by the life and verve he found in Dubai after having read so many negative reports in international media. He got a laugh out of his host, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, which was nice to see to be honest.)

Moussa set the scene for the rest of the forum, making the point that the Arab World faced challenges in the evolution of its media, particularly with the transition taking place between online and print media, "The Arab World is still launching newspapers while elsewhere in the world, newspapers are failing" he said, talking about the movement of paper to electronic media.

Its funny that this thinking persists - that we're going to stop using paper and just move into being nicely regulateable and licensable entities, identifieable online media houses. It denies the very real atomisation that is taking place as a result of the boom in consumer generated media and content. The concept of media ownership is being redefined.

Just before Moussa came onstage, a panel session had taken place with, among distinguished others, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, Editor in Chief of Gulf News (540g), who pointed out that venerable, 150-year-old institutions like the great American newspapers were shutting down and wondered what would take their place.

As if the process of their decline wasn't being driven by their replacement.

Portentous statements will be made, great declarations will be delivered, many issues will be debated. But the winds of change sweeping around the world, the process of disintermediation and the tools that are driving new ways of sharing information, thoughts, collaboration and innovation are not going to be among the many things the Forum considers seriously. The Middle East media, remember, is still launching newspapers.

It's as if we're making a virtue of being behind the curve - a curve we continue to lag ever more as we fail to teach online skills in schools and retard adoption through protectionism, mad pricing and content blocking.

I get the feeling that this is going to be something of a theme for this forum which features just a single session on online media, tucked in at the end of day one's proceedings. This panel (led by the BBC's Hossam Al Sokkari) will feature Google's regional manager and is the reason the forum will get to hear from its one, lone, blogger - an Algerian called Issam Hamoud.

One social media figure among all those media glitterati in this two-day media-fest. One 'public voice'. One ambassador for the 'new media'.

It reminds me a little of Michael Moorcock's excellent Brothel In Rosenstrasse (The book is, incidentally, most certainly NSFW, part of its quirky charm). The enemy army is on the borders of the city, but life goes on inside the brothel, unchallenged for the moment by the changes taking place outside, a bright burning of licentiousness in negation of the great and inevitable truth that's all around.

Until, suddenly, everything is rapidly, inevitably swept away along with the world that existed before it.

Legacy media is not going to be killed by social media, despite the much-publicised declines and closures. But it is being transformed by it - and those who are not driving that change are likely going to be swept aside by it.

The Arab Media Forum has, IMHO, missed a trick. So, arguably, has the Arab Media.

But Amr Moussa knows what's going on, at least...

Donkeys and The Media

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News makes donkeys of us all today.

Back up to 640g after some recent disastrous forays into the 500s and even 400s, your favourite newspaper trumpets 'Awards Muled for English Media' on its front page earpiece.

Something being muled is certainly a change from 'on the anvil', the favourite phrase among GN sub-editors for 'not ready yet'. So what is taking so much muling?

The answer is to be found in a page 7 interview with Mariam Bin Fahed, the Director of Dubai Press Club. Apart from confirming some Great Truths:

"There are some issues we don't want to discuss."

"If we see that the x-marks are higher, we avoid discussing the subject."

"There was an article that was too sensitive in 2006 and it was scored number one by the judges When it came to the senior panel members, they had to hold it back and the award went to the second candidate."

"You don't want to encourage negative acts."

The interview also contains the suprising assertion that "journalists are even writing articles specifically for the award now."

Needless to say, with many journalists in Egypt, for example, holding down two jobs to make ends meet, many of the region's vastly under-paid press would write articles about the pleasures of keeping bunny rabbits and making daisy chains if you offered them $15,000.

They'd probably write about bloody Modhesh for that much money.

Anyway, in the interview Mariam Bin Fahd didn't rule out an award for English language media that serve the region, hence the claim that the Press Club is muling an award.

It'll be interesting to see what wins this years Arabic awards given the clear signal in the piece that anything controversial, the result of great, ground-breaking journalism for instance, likely won't be muled at all...

A Comment for Tala al Ramahi

As a journalist I always disliked PRs intensely. They were all too frequently dumb, annoying and often tried, in some way, to manipulate me. I do so hate being manipulated, too. But I rarely, if ever, refused to listen.

Listening is so important to journalism, I always thought.

I'd like to think that the experience and attitude I gained from working as a writer and editor informs my work today as a PR practitioner. I like working with people, journalists, whom I respect. I enjoy working with people, journalists, who respect me in turn. It's often something won, on both sides, but can only be won where someone is open to talking to people, not closed to them, to start with.

That respect, perhaps lacking in this piece if you don't mind me saying so, is something built on an understanding between us. I will endeavour to be useful, relevant and helpful wherever I can so be. I will even aspire to being insightful. I will at all times be truthful. But I work within constraints set by my status as being retained to work in my clients' best interests - as my client and I define them.

On the journalist's side, it's much simpler. It's simply to give me the chance to make a case for my client based on respecting my track record, experience and knowledge of the market and the role and restrictions of media enough to give me the time of day. I like to think that, where I am given that freedom, I can help to deliver useful results for the media I work with. If that is not the case, then of course I would expect to fail, in future, to have a similar opportunity to argue my case.

Where my clients' interests and those of the public combine, I can usually 'sell' a story quite easily. Sometimes I find myself encountering a journalist that knows better and isn't buying. Then it's my job to convince that journalist that I've actually got something of relevance, topicality and interest to that readership. This should be a pleasant process, not a mindless drone of shirt-tugging and nagging. I think we both recognise that.

I often find that I can do that with people, journalists, who are willing to listen to an alternative viewpoint. Typically, those are people that afford me enough respect not to just brush me off as an annoying flak or 'another PR' - those unwilling to fall prey to the sickness of generalisation that is the enemy of any 'seeker after truth'.

A touch of humility, you see, often makes a good journalist a rather brilliant one, IMHO. But an arrogant refusal to listen to someone on the grounds that they serve an organisation with a vested interest is blocking one side of the story.

An organisation promoting something new isn’t automatically irrelevant or worthy of your contempt, by the way. Every innovation around you today, everything that informs and empowers your life in this modern world, was created by an organisation that had to promote that innovation.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to offer you some advice from an old man. You have to keep your eyes and ears open if you want to serve the public with the truth. Closing yourself to those who are employed to help organisations communicate more effectively does not, in my humble opinion, advance that public service. More effective communication is in my interest, my client’s interest, the public’s interest and, yes, your interest.

I’m sure we would also recognise that I’d rather you took the information from me and used it as part of a broader story that presents the market in an informed, insightful and illuminating fashion. That I would rather see experience, insight and research going into stories that I work with media on. I have no issue with you taking what I provide, testing it, comparing it with competitors and using it as part of a larger story that talks to the issues and circumstances that surround and drive the market. I'd love to see great journalism that truly informs the reader. I’d personally like to see a great deal more of that than we see in much of our regional media today.

Incidentally, I am amazed at how many journalists have not the faintest idea of, or interest in, what professional PR practitioners actually do get up to with clients. I'll give you a clue - it's not actually about writing press releases and calling around media to make sure they've received them.

Perhaps a touch of humility and basic, human respect might serve you as well as it would serve the PRs you deride and hold in such obvious contempt.

Judas or journalist?

Image by pythonboot via Flickr

I'm not sure how many silver coins are worth a gold one, but let's just put it at 30 for the sake of a decent headline.

It's a fine day when Emirates Business 24x7 is the only newspaper to expose a company that blatantly offers journalists the gift of gold for turning up to a press event, but that's precisely what reporter Dima Hamadeh did today. Her story 'outs' the World Gold Council and its PR company for sending a press invitation that promises all attendees to a WGC media event would receive a gold coin.

When taken to task by Hamadeh, the account manager at the agency responded with: "Why does it offend you? We have done it for years, not only for award announcements but for other events by the WGC as well."

The appropriate note of contrition perhaps lacking there, then...

Another PR person quoted in the story tells Hamadeh that "A lot of journalists call to know what they would be getting as a gift..."

Now that's news to me - in my 12 (grief) years in public relations I have never been asked by a journalist what gift is on offer at an event. In fact, I just checked around the Spot On office, and nobody else has, either. I can tell you that the answer to such a question would be very short indeed.

What on earth is the point of even wasting time talking to a roomful of journalists who have just pitched up to collect their bribe? What's the value of the debased coverage they would give you in their debased media? Besides, if you can own them enough to travel across town and listen to you for an hour for a coin, just send them the damn coin and the rubbish you want them to publish and save everyone some time, no?

The Middle East PR Association, MEPRA, stipulates a limit of $50 for media gifts - set as a reasonable limit for a small gift expected to represent a token of appreciation or thanks. The limit was set in response to a growing culture of outrageous attempts to bribe media, including gifts of consumer electronics such as games consoles, mobile phones and DVD players.

But gold coins are so much subtle, don't you think?

Now. Which publications have covered the World Gold Council jewellery design competition, Auditions? And can their journalists confirm they didn't take the coin?

The New UAE Media Law is .Not. Law

Image by Amy.Ng via Flickr

The New UAE Media Law has been passed by the Federal National Council, according to the Emirates news agency WAM.

The WAM story, filed just now, says that some 60% of the law has been modified, but doesn't say how the law has been modified or indeed whether the controversial 'harm to the economy' clause has been softened or clarified - or whether the 60% modifications were to the version of the law that's being debated or whether they were the original revisions that took place in the two years the law was, to use Gulf News subs' favourite phrase, 'on the anvil'.

We'll doubtless see more on this tomorrow. The law itself has provoked widespread media concern - and it does not, as far as I am aware or can find out, recognise the 'e-world' (for instance bloggers, forum commentators or, say, Twitterers) in any way. So whether you can go to jail for blogging or Tweeting something because you're not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law (that protection including huge fines) or not is still totally up in the air. Let alone where a journalist that blogs something stands.

Up until now, the party line has been that regulations will 'clarify' the law. But we haven't yet seen how clear the law, in its final form, truly is. Let's hope that one of tomorrow's papers gets to publish the full draft as approved by the FNC so we can see how the world has moved on since the UAE Journalists' Association published its voluntary Code of Ethics in October 2007...

** As has been noted on this blog before, 'post in haste, repent at leisure'.

Indeed, the new 'law' news from WAM is, as the (sadly) anonymous commenter on this post quite rightly pointed out, not really news. The President has not, as far as we know, signed it off. And so it's not a law. It's just the same old document (unseen) that we've all been waiting for along with some more comments on how it's going to be a wonderful law that we're all going to really enjoy living with. I'm going to hold on getting a red face over this until we see tomorrow's coverage from UAE media. This'll be interesting...

The Man Who Wasn't There

"A source said that Russian TV reported yesterday that Dubai Police had arrested Madov's killer."

So reports Gulf News today, a statement that, for me, shows neatly how reporting of the Jumeirah Beach Residence shooting has descended into something of a fiasco.

I'd quote yesterday's Reuters file that claimed the man wasn't dead, but it's been updated now - one danger of t'Internet being that when someone goofs, even someone as trusted and respected as Reuters, they can correct it instantly. Reuters now has a file stating that the dead man is Chechen army officer Sulim Yamadayev and another saying that the Russian Consul has confirmed his identity but hasn't seen a passport.

Gulf News yesterday reported that the dead man was called Sulaiman Madov. And today's front page story (the source of that marvellous quote above) continues in that assertion, based on the discovery of Madov's passport on the body by Dubai police. However, GN illustrates its story with pictures of Yamadayev and does refer to 'some media reports' that have identified the man as Yamadayev.

You can tell that GN is caught between a rock and a hard place, having to go with the 'official' identity Madov while (I guess) firmly believing the widespread media reports that Madov was actually Yamadayev. It must have been frustrating for their journalists.

KT's report, meanwhile, says that a Dubai Police spokesperson had confirmed there had 'been an error' about the Madov identity - KT goes with Yamadayev and includes some good background, including a game attempt to get the Austrian embassy to confirm that Yamadayev had been on a Chechen exiles 'death list' that the Austrian government had previously talked about.

The National, which was always firmly in the Yamadayev camp, was able today to feature a good background piece on Yamadayev. The strength of the journalism here is quite apparent - free to go with its own sources and tie together the different streams of information (embassies, wire reports, eye witnesses and so on), The National made up its own mind about the identity of the man and had more time to play with, which meant that it was able to focus on the 'back story' and produce a stronger and more emphatic piece today that focused not only on the facts of the killing, but the complex and often violent background to it.

I'm left with the feeling that yesterday was a race against the clock to try and find out what on earth was happening, a day of speculation and guesswork, intransigent 'official' sources and frustration. It must have been frenetic. But I do think The National came out on top because of its journalism and its ability to practice that journalism without worrying about contradicting an official source and having to wait until the 'error' was made official.

With the recent news that government ministries will have an 'official spokesperson', there is room for some doubt whether that will remain the case in the future.

One can only hope that it will.

UAE Government Appoints Spokespeople

Image via Wikipedia

According to a front page story in The National today, the Federal government has moved to introduce a system whereby Federal government Ministries can have official spokespeople empowered to talk on the record to media on behalf of each Ministry and its officials.

The move received what appeared to be a cautious welcome from the UAE Journalists' Association. The new spokespeople would be "The only sources of information according to their roles and responsibilities", The National quotes Najla Al Awar, Secretary General of the Cabinet. However, she goes on to tell the paper, "Information collected through others at the governmental bodies shall not be considered as valid and authorised information."

So while the move would facilitate journalists' access to a responsible spokesperson, it would also appear to limit media to reporting only facts confirmed or released by that responsible spokesperson.

You tell me which is better...