UAE Top Editors on Modern Journalism’s Greatest Challenge

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
From international headlines about Dubai to the pressures of covering global conflict and maintaining public trust, I've been speaking with Justin Harper, editor at Arabian Business, CEO Middle East, contributor to Arabian Business and CEO Middle East, Sahim Salim, the editor for the UAE, Khaleej Times, and Mark Thompson, who's the editor-in-chief at Gulf News about the responsibility of modern journalism that I guess fight for credibility and why accurate reporting matters more than ever.
Mira Business FM, Dubai's home of business radio. There's conflict and breaking news dominate headlines around the world. We want to look at how media shapes perception in real time next from war coverage and misinformation to Dubai's image on the international stage. The pressure on newsrooms has never been greater. With us is Mark Thompson, he's the editor-in-chief of Gulf News. Hopefully, to talk about the future of journalism, battle for credibility, how the regions view during volatile news cycle and probably a lot more. Probably too much actually, Mark, but good to have you here. Welcome.

**Mark Thompson** (1:21)
Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Thanks and pleasure to be here.

**Tim Elliott** (1:24)
Well, you're very welcome. I wanted to hit the ground running actually with you.
We are now smartphone users constantly. We all have one. So we're all journalists, aren't we? That much we all know. We're all reporters, citizen journalists, I suppose. With that in mind, what does the news front line look for you as a regional editor now?

**Mark Thompson** (1:50)
It looks busy. I think that's fair to say. As you say, there's a lot of people out there, there's a lot of brands out there. There's a lot of influences. There's state actors out there as well. That's hard as well. There's AI making even more noisy, just where we thought it couldn't get any more noisy. So whether I see our role at Gulf News and other brands here as well, I think we are the solid rocks in the storm, that when all this noise is happening around, you know that certain brands you can go to and be like, I know that, I can trust that.
Sometimes, I'll put my hand out, we might not be the most exciting, might not be the fastest, might not be the noisiest, but we're the kind of the rock where people can go to and say, yeah, this has happened, I'm just gonna go and check with Gulf News and make sure that is actually correct.

**Tim Elliott** (2:36)
I'm not so worried about not being the most exciting. I think that comes with age as well, by the way, probably. But, I mean, the simple fact is, you compete with algorithms now, they thrive on speed, they thrive on being first, very often at the expense of either accuracy and all too often truth, right? So, the ethics of daily reporting isn't what it was a few years ago. So, let's say, a big international story breaks.
How do you and your team balance the fact that you have to get the news out there, the fact that you have to be accurate before you actually kind of click, I don't know if you actually do click publish, I suppose you do actually. Yeah, that's the whole thing. But how do you get that balance now?

**Mark Thompson** (3:19)
That's a really good question, because that is very unique to every story, but to break it down really is, we get the information first, like everyone else does, and to extend, we've got certain sources, we've got certain access to certain things that other people don't have.
We get that information, but then it is about checking that it came from people that we can verify and trust, and try and get two sources. So it might be, we see something on social media comes from a celebrity or a politician, that comes out, we think there's a story, we just want to go and double check whether we can quickly fact check that and make sure there's another source that backs that up.

**Tim Elliott** (3:51)
That still exists. That's exciting to me, because that's what I was told years ago, two sources, till you got two sources done.

**Mark Thompson** (3:59)
That is actually different here, I think, to the UK, I'm from UK journalism, 20 years there, that has left some of that market, where some of that is now just go online and some people call it not wrong for long online. You can publish something and then you can go back and change and say, oh yeah, we got it wrong, but we changed it. That's not what we do here. It's very different that we want to be right first time.