After a decade and a half exactly after the start of the first electronic newspaper in the Arab world, the newspaper Elaph, there are many changes in the Arab media scene. At the beginning, Elaph was making its way through a difficult and bumpy path but managed from the very beginning to carve for itself a separate and distinct media personality, and this in itself is a big professional gain owed to its founder and team.
I do not deny that Elaph was so much surprising to us as readers in its beginnings with it unique outspoken approach in dealing with topics and issues, and some of its media analyses raised broad controversy and debate among intellectuals and people interested, but this debate remained a sign of health and wellness suggesting that the newspaper has its own distinctive character and clear editorial line, which it neither compromise nor change, and this in itself is also a good attribute in the professional media performance.
Throughout that relatively long period, ome websites and electronic newspapers appeared and shined like shooting stars but were soon extinguished and some became ashes, while others were no longer visible because of their excessive vocational, intellectual and media decline and receding. But Elaph remained cohesive and capable of calculated professional development, steadfast in the face of fierce competition, retaining for itself an array of readers, a feature of the most important attributes of thoughtfulness in media performance.
Elaph is in fact a “school” in the Arab electronic media, and it has its patrons and fans and admirers, and has become a landmark in professional performance that many followed and many imitated, but it remained in the middle of this media momentum a unique tag in its field and its performance.
I do not write here out of courtesy for Elaph or in support to it. It has become an “institution” in a website, and it has a huge Mass Effect that some Arab media institutions failed to achieve despite the availability of huge budgets and huge numbers of people and cadres that large buildings and floors are teeming with, which turned these buildings into a burden on the media performance of several Arab countries, and there is no longer any benefit to them except for providing a “shelter” to this huge quantum of people.
The fact that a decade and a half have passed after the founding of Elaph may be an opportunity to check the status of the Arab electronic media, particularly that the Arab media scene is teeming with considerable chaos, some of it has perhaps been quite difficult to solve, and the cyberspace has turned into a “forest” of sites and newspapers that many claim them to be “informational”, while they are not in line with professional media performance except in words, and some of these websites have, in many cases, violated intellectual property laws and rights, as well as personal privacy and stable societal norms.
The truth also is that the concept of the electronic newspaper has not settled in many cases in our Arab world. What is noticed is that some deal with the idea of online journalism as simply an electronic version of the print newspaper that suffers from the same symptoms, problems, crises and chronic diseases experienced by print newspapers for years and decades ago. There is nothing that proves that there is thoughtfulness in taking advantage of the attributes and characteristics of electronic publishing, except for the huge rush and annoying turnout on the publishing of large numbers of different pictures and occasions to the extent that some Arab newspapers have specialized in the publication of photographs of engagement and wedding parties of close friends and celebrities, and they have declined to the point of becoming like old wall newspapers and magazines, which used to publish pictures of social events for employees of institutions and companies !!
Few are the Arab electronic newspapers that recognize the real meaning of an online newspaper, and that it has a completely different personality, performance and professional standards from the traditional print newspaper. And sure enough, the limited development in the Arab online newspapers performance plays a major role in the survival of the Arab print newspapers so far, contrary to what is happening in the world around us.
It is true that there are tangled social considerations and factors that contribute to keep the Arab print newspapers alive, such as poor Internet penetration in many Arab countries in general and its limited geographical spread in other countries, particularly with regard to personal Internet or to Internet linked to smartphones that are able to interact directly with electronic media, and this in itself is linked to rates of education, awareness, economic factors and so on. There are also factors related to policy calculations and to social dimension that feeds the tendency to keep obsolete media institutions that employ tens of thousands of people who do not do a real work. There is also a traditional look rooted in some countries according to which printing is an evidence of truth, that is to say that the printing of a magazine or newspaper is an evidence on the well-being and survival of nations and on their cultural influence in their geographical surroundings, regardless of distribution considerations and economic feasibility calculations, which have become a decisive element in modern media performance, especially in the absence of considering the real impact as a goal supposed to be achieved by the media in general.
There are certainly successful experiences of Arab media in the world of electronic media, but they remain limited in number, and Elaph remains a distinguished label amidst this competition, acceleration and massive overcrowding in the Arab media market.
