Building a vibrant news industry in the Middle East and North Africa

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&/Google News Initiative, Feb. 21, 2024

by Karim Daoud, Karim Sarkis, Martin Roeske, Carla Khoury, and Mazen Sabbagh



Digitization is fueling growth for news organizations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, presenting both opportunities and challenges that must be addressed.

The news market in the region is promising. News consumption and demand are on the rise. MENA region consumers are willing to pay for the news they want, particularly trustworthy, in-depth, and specialized reporting. Additionally, there is significant room for revenue growth, especially in digital advertising and consumer revenues (digital circulation).

The growth is fueled by widespread mobile connectivity, high internet penetration, and social media usage in the MENA region, especially young consumers leading digital lifestyles. To attract and grow revenue from these tech-savvy consumers, news organizations need to transform their business models and methods of delivering content. That transformation must include creating new types of content, formats, and interfaces. Collaboration with governments in the MENA region, regulators, global tech platforms, advertisers, and academia is crucial in creating an enabling environment that supports the growth of regional news organizations. This environment can be achieved through talent development programs, targeted financial support, media literacy initiatives for consumers, and an updated regulatory framework.

Together these transformational efforts can lead to a better news consumption experience, high-performing news organizations, and an overall vibrant news ecosystem in the MENA region. Download the PDF here.

Daniel Pink's Required Reading

by Theodore Kinni

strategy+business, Sept 16, 2015

For the better part of two decades, Daniel Pink has been skewering conventional business wisdom and transforming complex ideas into practical approaches that his readers can put to work immediately. A best-selling author, popular speaker, and one of the world’s leading management thinkers, Pink is a practitioner of what has become — in no small part through the skill with which he plies his trade — a familiar format on the business bookshelf: the application of behavioral research to the world of work.

Pink applied this formula to employee incentivization in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books, 2009), which described the largely untapped power of intrinsic motivators, such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose, in the workplace. He took on thinking skills in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead Books, 2005), which tracked the rising need for cognitive traits, such as inventiveness, empathy, and meaning-making, in business. And he extended his reach into sales in To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others(Riverhead Books, 2012), which described a simple and powerful “ABC” for sales success (attunement, buoyancy, and clarity). In 2014, Pink began broadcasting his behavioral insights to broader audience as host and co-executive producer of “Crowd Control,” a 12-episode series airing on the National Geographic Channel.

Given the influential reach of his work (more than 2 million copies of his books have been sold), I asked Pink to name several books that had made a lasting impression on him. He called out four titles... read the rest here

Is investigative journalism dying out?

My weekly book post on s+b's blog covers two books--one that bemoans the dearth of muckrakers and one by a muckraker


Muckraking Is Alive and Well

Investigative reporting is the pinnacle of journalism, and has been ever since the early 20th century when writers like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker exposed systemic corruption in the United States and changed the nation. They helped bring down business trusts, provided the impetus for much-needed regulation and oversight (in Steffen’s case, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System), and created political platforms for reformers, such as Teddy Roosevelt, who named them muckrakers. Is there a business reporter who doesn’t aspire to follow in their footsteps?
 
And yet, less and less investigative—or accountability—reporting is being published, according to Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) editor and fellow Dean Starkman. In his fascinating, if somewhat flawed book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Starkman points to the subprime lending meltdown of 2007 as a primary example of his contention.

Although there has been no lack of high-profile investigative reporting since subprime lending imploded and caused a global recession, an examination of reporting on the subject in the years before the crisis tells another, rather curious, story. According to research that Starkman conducted at CSJ between 2004 and 2006—the period in which the worst lending excesses occurred—“mainstream accountability reporting [was] virtually dormant. The watchdog, powerful as it was, didn’t bark when it was most needed.”

But there’s more to the story... read it here

Journalistic objectivity?

I started browsing an advance copy of a new book - Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 - that collects all of the coverage of Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine over the past six decades. It was put together by Carol Loomis, whose first paragraph in the book's preface struck me as odd. Here it is:

Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether I'm not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warren's for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide-ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.

I don't quite follow the logic here. Being a close friend of Buffett precludes Loomis from writing a bio about him, but not writing about him in Fortune?

The other interesting thing is how adroitly Buffett and a few other businesspeople - Jack Welch and the late Steve Jobs come to mind - handle the press by picking out a favored few, who they then treat as friends and grant insider access. I wonder how much that has contributed to their reputations and whether there's a lesson in that for CEOs?

s+b's Best Business Books 2010

As in the past, it was a real pleasure to edit the Best Business Books special section for strategy+business. We had a terrific team of eight expert reviewers, who chose a great list of books. Here's my introduction to the essays and a link to the entire section:

Two years after the financial collapse, the idea of hunkering down and waiting for a return to business as usual — as people did in previous recessions — seems a less and less viable strategy. But what should you do instead?

In this edition of our annual review of the year’s best business books, you will find a reading list that offers intriguing and compelling answers to this question. The list, assembled by a distinguished team of experts, starts with a select guide to the year’s tallest stack: titles that parse the recession of 2007–09 for lessons in preventing another collapse. The reviewer is David Warsh, who covered economics for the Boston Globe for more than two decades and won financial journalism’s Gerald Loeb Award twice.

Next up is Walter Kiechel III’s essay on the best business books on leadership — in a year when the spotlight revealed an unflattering view of too many of our leaders. Kiechel, whose career included stints as the managing editor of Fortune and the editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing, reviews a handful of books that confront “traditional notions of leadership with new circumstances,” including the rise of social networking. (We didn’t cover the topic of strategy this year, but Kiechel’s engaging book The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World [Harvard Business Press, 2010] is featured in “The Right to Win,” by Cesare Mainardi with Art Kleiner, s+b, Winter 2010.)

The ramifications of technologically enabled societies play a starring role this year in University of Southern California Stevens Institute executive director Krisztina “Z” Holly’s review of the best books on innovation, and a supporting role in journalist Sheridan Prasso’s choices for the best books about China, now the world’s second-largest economy. Both are especially timely as organic growth becomes a top priority at many companies.

In the doing-more-with-less theme, strategy+business contributing editor Sally Helgesen returns with a selection of titles that call into question the “star” system of talent (a factor in the recent recession) and argue for a far more inclusive definition of human capital. In a complement to Helgesen’s essay, neuroscience author Judith E. Glaser examines the year’s best books on the human mind, which offer executives the means to improve their decision making and galvanize their workforce.

David K. Hurst, our longtime Books in Brief reviewer, finds that the Great Recession has not only emphasized the shortcomings of the managerial status quo, but also yielded a number of books that offer alternatives in its art and practice. Finally, University of Denver Daniels College of Business professor James O’Toole returns with his ninth consecutive annual best business books essay, which plumbs biographies and histories on subjects as diverse as Henry Luce and Chinese tea for business lessons that are as relevant as today’s headlines.

In a time of halting recovery, frugal consumers, tight money, and increasing government activism, companies urgently need winning strategies. For executives charged with creating and executing those strategies, this year’s best business books are a valuable source of insight and inspiration...read the essays here>

Posts for writers; Free is taken to task

I've read a couple of blog posts in the past week or so that are worth considering if you're a writer:

David Pogue, posting on the New York Times blog, answers a reader's question: "When will you share your productivity tips with us? Not everyone can write five books a year, file two columns a week, churn out a daily blog, speak 40 times a year and film a video every Thursday. What are your secrets?" Hint: long work hours, speech recognition, and typing short cuts.

In his blog, Wordwork, journalist Dan Baum calls for the elimination of the nut graph. He says having a paragraph that sums up the writer's thesis is a useful convention for news reporters and newspaper readers, but that it's counterproductive in longer works. I tend to agree.

In the business book world, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion) is attracting plenty of criticism. First, a blogger named Waldo Jaquith at Virginia Quarterly Review discovered that Anderson had lifted passages in the book from Wikipedia without attribution and Anderson apologized, blaming sloppy editing. Then, Malcolm Gladwell, another popular writer in the one-idea-per-book genre, criticized Free for its sloppy thinking in a New Yorker review. And today, Janet Maslin criticized Free as just plain sloppy in the New York Times' Books of the Times column. Hmmm...seems like a theme is developing.

McIntyre's editing rules

John McIntyre, director of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, an affiliate faculty member at Loyola College of Maryland, and a former president of the American Copy Editors Society, pulled together a funny - and informative - list of 25 rules of editing. Here's the first five:

1. The project will require three times the planned time to achieve one-third of the desired result (McIntyre’s Ratio).
2. Writers will never straighten out it’s and its.
3. No matter how many times an article is edited or proofed, some reader will find a mistake in it.
4. To reporters, all deadlines are fungible.
5. Percentages will have been miscalculated 42 percent of the time...read the rest of the rules here.

P.S. I probably violated Rule 20 in the first sentence, but I like the way it looks.

In support of plain English

Who knew there was a National Plain English Day? There is, in the UK at least, and last December, the Local Government Association celebrated by publishing the LGA ‘non-word’ list, 100 words that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide. Words on the list include: coterminosity, empowerment, multidisciplinary, place shaping, and sustainable communities. The LGA suggests that unless "local authorities talk to people in a language that they can understand then the work they do becomes inaccessible and reduces the chances of them getting involved in their local issues."

Chairman of the Local Government Association, Sir Simon Milton, said:“Plain English Day is a timely reminder for all of us that we can not, must not and should not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases...Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?“

The list is back in the news this month because a local council in England wanted to ban the word "brainstorming" to avoid offending epileptics and replace it with "thought showers."

It's a good lesson for business writers, consultants, and managers, too. Although I would hate to give up "stakeholder" which has always reminded me of killing vampires.

Of widgets and whatchamacallits

Thanks to Al Vogl, head editor over at The Conference Board Review, I got a quick, paid education in the naming business a couple of months ago. The article that resulted is in the May/June issue and is available online, too:

George Eastman's dry-emulsion film simplified and popularized the art of photography. In 1888, he registered the trademark Kodak to identify his film and the cameras that used it, and began advertising their ease of use: "You press the button, we do the rest." By dint of his prodigious brand-building genius, the Eastman Co. soon laid claim to the leading position in a field of more than fifty competitors. Today, the film that created a corporate giant is tottering toward buggy-whip status, but the name Eastman chose still has legs. In 2006, even in the midst of the turmoil caused by the digital revolution, the Kodak brand ranked seventieth in the world in value, with an estimated worth of $4.4 billion, according to the annual Interbrand Corp./BusinessWeek brand survey. Not a bad return on a manufactured word...(read more)

Puzzle pieces

If you've wondered about the origin of the sudoku puzzles that have sprouted like weeds in newspapers and magazines everywhere, check out today's NYT article on Maki Kaji, the father of sudoku and founder of what could end up becoming the next global publishing empire, Nikoli. I was intrigued to read that Nikoli was built on an open source basis; the people who buy its puzzles also refine them and design new ones. By the way, Kaji's US literary agent is none other than my own, superagent John Willig. Hmmm, wonder which one of us generates more commissions?

Speaking of puzzles, the pieces seem to be falling into place over at Portfolio, the massively-hyped new Conde Nast business magazine. According to a post over at Talking Biz News, the first issue, which will stand alone until the presses start running full time about four months from now, supposedly contains a bunch of 5,000 word articles, as well as a 25,000 word piece on hedge funds by New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe. For more on the ambitious new magazine, which hopes to expand the genre and broaden the audience, check out Paul Farhi's article in American Journalism Review.

Radio radio

Richard Siklos at The New York Times didn't do the proposed merger of satellite radio players Sirius and XM any favors when he opened his Sunday story on the architect of the plan with: "Mel Karmazin could sell microwavable ice to Eskimos." Other recent NYT stories, such as the one on the premium Karmazin offered XM to get it to accept the deal and the one on how the deal is timed to take advantage of the current administration's willingness to accommodate Big Business, also gave the impression that Karmazin is trying to pull a fast one on the public and their not-always-so vigilant regulatory watchdogs.

Maybe he is. Today's NYT story suggests that FCC chairman Kevin Martin thinks so and indeed, it does look like Karmazin is sugarcoating the benefits to satellite radio subscribers, like me. Given what I had read up 'til now, I presumed that if the merger closed, I'd get XM programming in addition to my current Sirius programming for the same price I pay now. Silly me. It turns out Mel is only offering to give me the same programming I get now for the same price, for a while. If I want XM, I'll pay more. In other words, Karmazin's promise of more choice and lower prices is actually more choice or the same price.

As a Sirius stockholder, I am totally in favor of the merger. As a customer, I don't care much one way or another. As a citizen, I'm wondering if all this posturing by Congress and the FCC is just show biz or if they really are serious about minding the air waves.

Scavenging at the SEC

I know that reading 10-Ks and Qs and all the other forms that the SEC requires public companies to file can be deadly boring, but they are also a rich and free source of story leads and investment info. For the raw materials, just click over to Edgar Online, the SEC's database of filings, enter your corporate target's name, and start downloading.

Interpreting the filings is labor intensive, so it pays to get a little education first. If you are a business writer, visit the National Center for Business Journalism and check out their free workshops and online seminars. The week-long, online 'Boot Camp' seminar taught by Chris Roush, asst professor of journalism at UNC Chapel Hill, is a great intro to ferreting through corporate filings.

If you aren't a journalist, get one of the many books on reading corporate financial reports. Michelle Leder's Financial Fine Print is a readable and uncomplicated place to start. And to get a better idea of why it pays to know how to read SEC filings, you also might want to start reading Leder's blog Footnoted.org. You'll be surprised at the stuff she digs up.

Business reporters bite, too.

Certain business journalists have been getting criticized for hitching free rides on private jets and taking Asian junkets from the companies on which they report. Everyone is angry that they are suckling at the corporate teat. So, I was happy to see a more positive view of the ilk in the lead story in this week's Working Knowledge e-letter from Harvard Business School. (Get a free subscription here.)

HBS prof Gregory Miller analyzed corporate financial scandals and was surprised to find that 29% of the time the business press beats the SEC to the story. Further, when scandals do come to light, business journalists, in both the mainstream media and the trades, add a great deal of new knowledge to the investigations. His conclusion: Business journalists are pretty good watchdogs.

That makes me feel better about never getting offered any of the really great swag.