Tag Archives: al ahram

#WEFHamburg: Values at the heart of a news organisation’s journalism, structure and business

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The panel was called “How to break away from the “he said yesterday” journalism?”, but the discussion moved on to what values should be at the heart of a news organisation’s journalism, structure and business.

Some valuable advice came from Francisco Amarai, director of design studio and media consultancy Cases i Associats and formerly artistic director of and executive editor of Correio Braziliense

Successful newspapers see the news through the eyes of their readers, he said. And through print and online design and editorial choices, newspapers can rethink the relationship that they have with their readers.

According to Amarai, newspapers that are successful:

  • have well-defined values;
  • know their readers;
  • are newsy;
  • have talented staff in their newsrooms, who can offer their own points of view as well as news;
  • and have time.

In discussing time, he referred to the restructuring of O Estado de Sao Paulo in March this year. The paper decided to lengthen its editing time, starting checks, editing and layouts earlier in the day. Since the change in working patterns, circulation has increased by eight per cent in six months and page views have grown by 110 per cent over the past 12 months.

For fellow panellist, Abdel-Moneim Said, chair of the Al Ahram Group in Egypt, said newspapers need to see themselves as part of a media house not just a publishing house.

“We’re not journalists, we’re part of a larger family called media, which means to inform people in a variety of ways,” he said, adding that “different moods [of people] will call for different ways of getting information” and different means of deriving revenue.

Click here for more information on how to follow the World Editors Forum with Journalism.co.uk.

#WEFHamburg: Al Ahram chair defends photoshopped image of Egyptian president

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The chairman of the Al Ahram Group, whose newspaper was internationally critcised for publishing an altered image of world leaders at recent Middle East peace talks, defended the photoshopping as an artistic illustration of the story.

Speaking at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, Abdel Moniem Said said the photo, which showed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak walking ahead of other world leaders, including Barack Obama, at the talks, was viewed out of context.

“We published all the photos after the Washington meetings, and then we had another meeting 14 days later in Sharm el Sheik led by Mubarak [the Egyptian president],” Said told delegates.

The subsequent feature in the paper was labelled “special report” and used five photos from the meeting, of which the altered image was one. According to Said, there was a caption accompanying the changed picture describing how Egypt was leading the piece talks

The story of the “tampered” image was picked up by international news outlets, including the Guardian and Telegraph, after first being spotted by a blogger.

But Said condemned the way in which the photo was republished, saying it was stripped of its titling, caption, artist’s signature and context.

“I can give at least 100 cases that did the same thing to illustrate a case even using Obama himself,” he said, referring to criticism of a recent Economist front cover.

Said said he had written to many of the news organisations who had reported the picture, but none had published his response. The Guardian did include a report on Al Ahram’s editor’s defence of the image.