Al-Ahram Weekly | Special | Taking ourselves too seriously

With an infinite flow of information online and via satellite, it becomes increasingly difficult for print media to compete. In the face of declining readership and soaring printing costs, publications need to find creative ways to withstand the challenge. As we go beyond the celebration of our 15th year, these are the new sorts of issues that Al-Ahram Weekly -- like other papers -- needs to tackle

Taking ourselves too seriously

Al-Ahram Weekly has always been about beating the odds to survive. Can it continue to do so in a rapidly-changing local, regional and global political and media environment? Only if takes itself a little less seriously in some areas, and a lot more seriously in others, writes Tarek Atia*

Who could have predicted, 15 years ago, that Al-Ahram Weekly would go beyond its framework as an English- language vehicle of the giant, state-affiliated Al-Ahram press organisation, and become -- for the most part -- an internationally-acknowledged and respected voice from the Middle East?

In fact, the Weekly 's global reputation and success have been so staggeringly positive that visiting journalists and new staff members are usually astounded to discover that the inner workings of the office are actually somewhat chaotic, to the extent that the paper itself seems to appear each week via a combination of good luck and gusto.

"The Thursday miracle" is what our founding editor Hosny Guindy used to call the Weekly, which occasionally -- late on a Wednesday with nearly half of the pages still in some part of the editing cycle -- looked like it might not actually come out the next morning.

I always had my own Weekly joke. Why were we limiting ourselves to appearing on a certain day of the week, I would ask. Wouldn't it make our lives so much easier, if we were to adopt a name like Al-Ahram Suddenly, which would allow us to appear on the newsstand any time we felt like it?

In the early days, a name like that might also have been more effective with our sources. When we first hit the market, before anyone had really heard of us, a typical exchange between a reporter and source usually went like this:

"Hello, this is so-and-so from the Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper, and I would like to interview you about such- and-such..."

And then, without fail, would come the response -- " Al-Ahram Mickey ?" -- as if we were from some new Al-Ahram children's comic book.

Another funny adaptation we used to sometimes hear was " Al-Ahram Quickly ". Considering our uncanny ability to put the paper together using only the latter part of our workweek, that particular misnomer actually seemed quite accurate sometimes.

The most biting moniker, however, was " Al-Ahram Weakly ", which some of our harshest critics -- many of them fellow journalists -- would call us, usually because of what they saw as a pro-governmental bias, or an especially embarrassing typo.

Still, by virtue of the fact that -- for the longest time -- there wasn't much competition, we were also often called the strongest paper in town. People usually dropped their original impression -- that we were probably just an English translation of the daily Arabic Al-Ahram -- once they actually began reading the paper itself. Our balanced domestic political coverage -- especially -- was even sought out by serious Arabic-speaking readers who otherwise felt they were only getting half the story from either the government or opposition press. It was only in the Weekly, they would say, that you could get both point of views.

That particular niche, however, began to disappear last year with the emergence of independent Arabic dailies like Al-Masry Al-Youm, which basically began doing the same thing we had been doing for years -- providing balanced coverage of the domestic political scene.

Today, there is also a lot more competition on the English side of the equation -- from the plethora of glossy magazines, to a new daily, to the intermittent appearance of other serious newsweeklies. Major agencies like AP, Reuters, and AFP also seem to be dedicating much more of their resources to our region, in the process producing a lot of the stories that we used to have a monopoly on. Satellite television and the Internet have also changed the market altogether, providing readers with an infinite number of choices when it comes to perspectives on Egypt.

Today's rapidly-changing, media-saturated world will inevitably gobble up and spit out any entity that doesn't carefully examine the market, and respond to the changes therein accordingly. Actually, the whole Egyptian media scene -- and not just the Weekly -- needs to seriously consider these types of issues. Only those entities that do will survive and thrive. And here again, the Weekly has the chance to be a pioneer, to lead the market in adapting to changing reader needs.

- Are we going to be a "viewspaper" or a "newspaper" in a world where readers are increasingly looking to newspapers as aggregators of news and views rather than sources of original reporting and scoops?

- Will we be able to adapt our formula successfully in a way that takes advantage of our strengths, and drops or overcomes our weaknesses at the same time?

- How are we going to get young people -- the inevitable future of any media's readership base -- really interested in our product?

- What are the best ways to use delivery channels like the Internet to our best advantage?

In this radically different environment, what we decide to do next with Al-Ahram Weekly will determine whether the paper continues to fulfill its stated role as a reliable and popular provider of Egyptian perspective. It all boils down to asking the audience what they want; to stop assuming that we know all the answers already. For example, there has always been a knee-jerk aversion amongst some of our editors to what is disparagingly referred to as "light" content, in favour of the heavy analytical focus, with the assumption always being that our serious readers -- the diplomats, academics, researchers, etc -- don't want that other stuff. But in listening to that assumption (without actually validating it), have we ended up ignoring a steadily growing market segment -- people who read English, but are also interested in pop culture, for instance, or the economy of daily life, more than domestic politics? Why can't we serve both audiences equally well?

That is certainly not an easy mission. But by taking the business of running a paper more seriously, it may be the only way that we can avoid -- suddenly, quickly, weakly -- becoming Al-Ahram Irrelevant.