Two years after its launch, Newland has stepped aside to become editorial director and Fattah has become its editor. The paper's sales have doubled year-on-year with 20,000 paid subscriptions. Another 20,000 issues are distributed for free of charge - to encourage further subscription - while a further 20,000 are sold in retail outlets across the country. It has also proved to be popular amongst the local Emirati community as well as with expatriates.
Click here for a three page article on all the paper's many glories
38 comments:
is this all that has happened in the uae media world for the past few months that is worth commenting on.
i am so glad i dont live and work there alongside all the superficial materialistic expats and the indolent indigineous idiots who sell sand.
20:20:20
Must be nice being unrealistically symmetrical.
He insists that the government has never told him to pull a story.(...) I never get phone calls to be told ‘don't do stuff'."
Wow, Does anyone else but him believe such things?! From what I understand, such a comment couldn't be further from the truth.
We're so glad you don't live and work here too.
60,000 isn't remotely honest, since the paper is virtually invisible in Dubai and large parts of Abu Dhabi.
And why doesn't this article mention how management recently introduced budget cuts of 60 per cent, as well as rumours of further staff cutbacks?
Fattah has little to boast about - under his tenture, the paper has lost dozens of staff members and morale is at an all time low. The paper is now a national joke in the hands of an inexperienced amateur.
Anonymous @19:08
Anyone who has worked on The National can tell you that Fattah is telling a lie.
There are many examples (the Sheikh Issa case is the most obvious) of official instructions to avoid or downplay a story. There are many many more examples, though, of Fattah killing or editing stories in order to produce what he believes to be the government line, saving the authorities the trouble of having to call him and tell him what to do.
Just like to agree with the last comment. Due to problems with the press plant in Abu Dhabi, print run is only about 25,000. Full capacity was supposed to be 60,000 but there are always problems.
As far as not pulling stories, have a word with Simon Pearce, the director of strategic communications for the Abu Dhabi royal family. He's on the phone to Hassan more often than his wife (and that's a lot too...)
Read the below - Basically, Mr Fattah is admitting that he is an inexperienced fool. A start-up has to, if anything, be even MORE careful about its expenditures. And the people in charge MUST keep on top of what they are spending and know exactly what they are spending. Indeed, it is easy now to see why staff members were cheated out of promised bonuses --- all the money was wasted. So, if he is now thinking about how the money is being spent is he making a push to reduce his salary to something proper for a man of his talents?
"We are no longer a start-up. When you are a start-up you spend and spend, and you don't know you are spending because you don't have the accounts. Before you know it's a year and you think ‘wow, how did I spend that?' We've had to reign in certain expenditures, we had to think about how we're doing things."
Press Problems?
The brand new ADMC printing press complex is the best in the region. They print more newspapers than anybody else. National, Ittihad, 7 Days, FT, and one or two other Arabic titles.
This is old news but still a pretty conclusive example of political censorship at The National:
http://www.thedohadebates.com/news/item.asp?n=6626
Hows about this. Discuss...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/dubai-sex-tourism-prostitution
How quickly do you all think The National would be looking for a new editor if its current one didn't keep to the party line? It's the in-house journal of Al Nahyan Inc, trading as the Emirate of Abu Dhabi: do you think the editor of the Toyota house magazine, or any other company magazine, doesn't self-censor?
Fattah shows his complete lack of experience when he says: 'Before you know it's a year and you think ‘wow, how did I spend that?''
Is this really a responsible thing for an Editor to say - when he has already told staff they won't have any bonuses or pay rises? And when his newspaper barely breaks the 40,000 mark?
Any other Editor would have been fired by now for sheer incompetence.
I have heard The National is getting ready for yet another round of job cuts.
Anonymous @ 21.57
The ADMC printing plant can't be the best in the region. Do you even know anything about the region, in fact?
Newspapers in Egypt regularly shift over one million copies a day. By extension, they have the best printing plants in the region.
The National does 40,000 copies a day. More realistically, 25,000. By that logic, The Beano sells more copies. And it isn't censored like The National either.
I do not believe the National's circulation numbers.
Rather than making unilateral claims about their numbers they should address this issue transparently and apply for a circulation audit.
If they do not then you know they are lying about their numbers
Just heard some hilarious news about who The National's new UK sports correspondent is going to be.
So much for being able to "hand-pick the talent from around the globe". They have appointed a young sub-editor (and I stand corrected if I am wrong about this one) who has absolutely no experience of writing and no contacts.
Unfortunately, for The National, I am already hearing that people are working (very) hard to put his (lack of) reputation ahead of him and it looks like being an absolute disaster.
As usual, he is probably a sacrificial lamb thinking he is going to come out of this all right but has, no doubt, served his purpose in Abu Dhabi and is being let down gently (for a week or two). Poor lad, one way or another, he will be out of a job by Christmas (are we still allowed to mention that...)
Re: Press Problems?
The brand new ADMC printing press complex is the best in the region. They print more newspapers than anybody else. National, Ittihad, 7 Days, FT, and one or two other Arabic titles.
15 May, 2010 21:57
Still, all in all, doesn't add up to 60,000 for the lot, nevermind The National by itself...
In Egypt they print 32 pg papers with 4 Pgs of colour if you are lucky. Papers in the UAE are 64 to 100 pgs full colour gloss art paper. Egypt and UAE are in different worlds. Do you actually know anything about the region?
""...Before you know it's a year and you think ‘wow, how did I spend that?' We've had to reign in certain expenditures, we had to think about how we're doing things."
REIGN in certain expenditures? I hope this is your typo and not Hassan showing he can't write?
National prints 40,000. The subsciption figs seem about right but they only sell about 4,000 a day now (much improved from early this year when they struggled to break the 500 mark) Miles away from the 90,000 the sales team are claiming!. 7DAYS has dropped from 70,000 to 60,000 copies(audited)and are going weekly in August - not sure what is going on there. Gulf News is due to release some new figures (audited)and they are expected to fully disclose what the breakdown is by Emirate which might suprise a few people. Khaleej Times finishes its print run so soon after it starts people are wondering if it has finally dropped below the 20,000 mark! (Wont stop the agencies filling it with Ads though as the KT kickbacks are HUGE!)
7 Days to become, ahem, 1 Day in the next month, due to lack of revenue.
I think The National just might pull it off. If they have 20 000 subs, sell roughly 5 000 - 10 000 at the till point (Gulf News only sells 9 000 acording to their audit sheet) and bulk the rest ie villa drops etc etc standard sampling, they have a business.
Their web traffic is excellent for a 2yr old paper (600 000+ uniques with the G News at about 1 000 000).
As an upmarket paper they don't need a big circulation. They have the right reader profile.
Apropos of nothing to do with circulation, I'd just like to ask: am I the only one who notices a pattern in the National's coverage? Red Bull Air Race, Dubai Open, Bull Baiting (currently running), Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Fujairah Mountains, the silly Island with all the wildlife not native to UAE. It's like Fattah goes to the calendar, figures out what they ran this time last year and then assigns that story to the person who replaced the poor sod who got sacked or quit from the boredom of it all. I've seen four Bull Baiting stories in the paper since it started. Every year they up the coverage of the Red Bull Air Race, up the coverage of the Arms Expo...
So it'll be:
Red Bull,
MEIFF,
Some silly fashion show,
The Arms Expo with the tanks and shite,
A car show at the Burj Dubai (sorry Burj Kallifa),
Something about hunting or whatever tribesmen do in the mountains,
Bull Baiting again,
Another story about the Burj Dubai (sorry Burj Kallifa),
A BREAKING STORY ABOUT ANOTHER BUILDING FIRE!!!!!
And then just repeat until you get promoted to publisher. Pray one of the owner's brothers doesn't do something so damnably embarrassing that you absolutely must run something in order to maintain some modicum of credibility. Or maybe you pray that one of the brother does do something very embarrassing so you can prove you deserve to be publisher by handling it with such kid gloves that you prove to be a company man... hmm, I've not worked it all out in my head yet.
Lemme check to see if they still have the Mossad killing in Dubai up on the website, oh yes, there it is. How many more months is it going to be up there I wonder? Are they a newspaper or a library?
The Gulf News Audit is out, 70,000 copies in Dubai, 8,000 copies sold daily across UAE the rest subs. With pass on rates that makes them just under 7days in Dubai but still the biggest in UAE. With the National's rate of growth and Gulf News lack of growth, they could be level pegging in a couple of years.
Just seen this:
http://www.7days.ae/storydetails.php?id=95282&page=local%20news&title=Making%20our%20case
Well done 7Days!
Fattah might be a clown but he has made one smart decision. He has sacked Colin Randall, whose barking mad ravings about 'house style' and grammar in AD (and this from a bloke who was semi-literate ) made him such a favourite with the troops. Thanks to his mate Newland, Randall bagged a cushy number in Europe as a 'roving' commentator. His output was awful even by the standards of the National. He must have thought Newland would protect him. Now Newland has moved on and has no time for a bore whose 'columns' would not get into an AD free sheet.
Good on you Anonymous 17 June. Randall was a joke. He sat at his desk with a marker pen and read proofs. If he found an Americanism he circled it and squealed style was not being followed. after a while no one took any notice. His files from France were a joke. Good riddance. How much longer can James Langton survive. How are the mighty fallen. One day he is a blubbery hitler bossing the Saturday, next he is lifting off the net and turning it into crap little stories.
@22 May, 2010 20:33
the new UK sports correspondent lasted all of two weeks before resigning / being forced out. That was his thanks for two and a half years in the desert.
btw, where have the sports results pages gone in The National?
The National website gets 600,000 plus uniques a month?? seriously??
Sad to say that the prediction about the new UK Sports Correspondent became true but it was an accident waiting to happen. He had ideas above his station and ended up being stabbed in the back by people he thought respected him and treated as friends. A tough lesson for him but doubt he'll learn. As for the sports results pages, they cost something like £30 per day for one or two page ready information stations. That is now deemed too expensive. How times have changed...
All of these circulation numbers are specious. The website does not come close to 600,000 unique hits per, I'm assuming, month. David Green, for a long time,prevented people from getting the Google password so as not to leave them completely depressed. Book reviews in Arts and Life, for example, regularly get zero hits.
As for the paper edition, did no one find it a bit strange that when the paper launched, the figured bandied about was 70,000, then when Fiona conducted some kind of circulation study, she had something like three or four groups of readers whose numbers magically equaled 70,000. A useless study by a useless marketer.
Does no one remember the mandate that came down ordering no negative stories about Dubai when the lay offs there began? It was certainly no secret.
I also overheard Hassan telling someone that the decision to pull the Doha Debate ad was "not a journalistic one".
I guess with the overflow of advertising, who needed another one.
Hassan Fattah was fired from the NY Times for virtually destroying that newspaper's coverage of Iraq. He so alienated everyone vital to the coverage that they would not speak with him.
In the words of a high-level Times editorial figures when asked for a comment on Fattah to help me decide whether to come here or not: "Hassan Fattah is trouble."
How prophetic.
UAE female poet harnessed/slapped and expelled by the corrupt Arab League head Amr Mousa
http://www.anhri.net/en/?p=811
June 29 14.24 -
You have hit the ball out of the park on Fattah's Iraq coverage. His lazy reporting skills forced the NYT to issue a major apology on its front page. Little wonder he washed up in Abu Dhabi, he wouldn't be trusted to edit a restaurant menu anywhere else:
Hassan Fattah, New York Times' Abu Ghraib photos (2006)
In March 2006, the New York Times ran a front-page interview by reporter Hassan M. Fattah with an Iraqi who claimed he was the man hooded and hooked up to wires in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison picture. The Internet magazine Salon quickly questioned the man's claim, as did the U.S. military, and the Times soon discovered that the man was not really the person in the picture. Furthermore, the Times had run the actual man's name in its own pages several years earlier. It admitted in an editor's note that it did not do enough to establish the man's identity.[61]
According to their online audit by Effective Measure, The National website got 432,000 uniques per month in June. But GCC uniques were only 88,000. Even when it wasn't summer, GCC uniques was 135,000. GCC is the only traffic that matters in advertising.
Lack of leadership - and the accompanying idiotic management style - continues to influence decisions to leave the paper: latest announcements include the editor of the Review section and his partner, a National reporter, a Business reporter (and the rest of the Business reporters are feverishly looking for a way out...anyone know why there are so many editors on the Business desk?), several other National reporters, the Review section's lead writer...and it will continue.
Now before someone says "They all left for better jobs"...ask around. Yes, the employment market is abysmal, journalism jobs are scare, but word is out. Before long, the only people left to gather around the table in the centre of the office will be old, over the hill subs and Koot and Fattah, plus a sprinkling of individuals making so much money that they are chained to the National.
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