According to centuries-old journalistic orthodoxy, writers and editors live on one side of an impenetrable barrier while advertising sales and marketing staff live on the other. Hungarian-American media figure Joseph Pulitzer – the namesake of the world’s best-known prize for journalism – is credited with saying that commercial success is good for a newspaper’s “moral side” and therefore has “a legitimate place” in a media organization’s business office.

But he is cited even more famously as godfather of a media dogma which declares that professional journalism requires the strictest separation of commercial and editorial. “Commercialism, which is proper and necessary in the business office, becomes a degradation and a danger when it invades the editorial rooms,” Pulitzer wrote more than 90 years ago.

A credo of professional journalism was at the essence of Executive magazine’s market approach from the first issues. Thus, when Yasser Akkaoui acquired a share in the publishing company and assumed managerial responsibility at the magazine in spring of 2001, this approach had already caused a disruption to the habitual local complicity between advertisers and media. “The team had already shocked the market and created ‘bad communication’ because we were the only magazine doing investigative journalism while other publications were in the game of glorifying their advertisers,” remembers the man informally known as Yasser.

Until today, Executive has not shied away from ruffling corporate and official feathers while at the same time exerting every diligence in our power to be non-partisan and factual in our criticisms. Even when trumpeting causes in advocacy pieces we strive to be anti-sensationalist and respectful of the status quos we aim to change. Underlying this approach is a philosophical belief that a country:

a) needs to have an equitable and profit-generating, private sector-led economy in order to provide its residents with a great framework for building satisfying lives;

b) that the public and private economic players need to be alerted to the presence of flaws and weaknesses that befall even the best organizations; and

c) that it is the job of economic media to investigate and point out flaws, dangers and risks, just as much as it is our job to identify and push trends, visions and opportunities.    

The critical and advocacy varieties of journalism are not easy to sell to advertisers. However, the persistent work of Executive’s business team and in-house advertising sales force of three allowed the publication to rise from a monthly count of very few (and often bartered) ad pages in the first two years of publication to today being at the top of every media plan in its market segment. Graziella Nassar Aouad, head of Executive’s marketing team from 1999 until January 2016 (see Letter to Gracy), recalls how, in her first years on the job, most ads in the segment of English-language business publications would be gobbled up by competitor Lebanon Opportunities. “This did not deter us. We tried for several months but it was not easy to convince people who were used to dealing with the other publication,” she says. 

[pullquote]“We were the only magazine that decided that we wanted to engage industry players in tackling the country’s challenges and calling   for change”[/pullquote]

According to Gracy, as she is known throughout the Lebanese marketing communications sector, a handful of advertising industry leaders were spearheads in encouraging the Executive team, including people like Nada Daccache, Fouad Sabbagh, Hala Badran, Randa Tabet and Dany Richa. “They really helped us make things happen and also helped us get to clients,” she says.

It took long hours of work and the offering of some free advertisements to get the deal flow going, but she and her team succeeded in building relationships with the first clients, such as automotive dealers that are still with Executive today. “In general, the old clients who started working with us never stopped. Some companies have reduced their budgets in the current market, which is weak. But we are still getting ads to this day and are on top of the media plans,” Gracy says.

In the early 2000s Executive developed a strategy of seeking to motivate advertising clients, as it did with all members of the Lebanese business community, to subscribe to the cause of Executive rather than seeing it as just another media outlet to reach customers. “We were the only magazine that decided that we wanted to engage industry players in tackling the country’s challenges and calling for change. Our commercial team was an integral part of reaching out to corporate Lebanon and communicating how we wanted corporate Lebanon to be perceived,” Yasser tells Executive. 

As it gave them an opportunity to appear as authoritative stakeholders in the Lebanese economy, companies appreciated Executive management’s concept of engaging them in conversations on the issues facing Lebanon. For editors and journalists, the concept often enough supplied material for very lively debates with the editor-in-chief – and perhaps this or that resignation – but at the end of the day, interference in writers’ freedom to cover stories was far less than one experienced at other publications in Lebanon and indeed, most countries between the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Sirte.

Editorial beauty and the commercial beast – time to challenge a perception

Given that Executive editors take their independence from commercial or political influences very seriously, and prefer to draw the ire of an advertiser by describing things how we perceive them rather than telling the story in the way the commercial client would like it told, it is no wonder that the business office on one side of the building and the editorial space on the other side have remained very different environments throughout the publication’s history.   

However, under issue 200’s double priority of acknowledgement and appreciation, it was a must to investigate the role of the business department. The first striking difference between the business team and editorial is the turnover rate. In editorial, long-term presences are the exception. Writers and editors tend to change with a frequency and sometimes abruptness that could be frightening. In the business department, on the other hand, the majority of team members have an employment record of more than ten years with Executive. In handling all practical aspects of distribution and communication with external stakeholders, these long-term team members represent the stability and reliability that is essential for keeping the magazine going.

As the core of the business department, the advertising sales team was not only important for financial sustainability but also for the whole enterprise’s internal coherence. “When you work with foreign editors and journalists, they may be here for a year or two. This is inevitable, but such constant change hurts the magazine. Sometimes the foreigners don’t understand the market. This can be a challenge because it is important for the client to feel that a journalist who interviews them has a solid background of local knowledge and is aware of everything that is happening in the country,” Gracy explains.

[pullquote]As the core of the business department, the advertising sales team was not only important for financial sustainability but also for the whole enterprise’s internal coherence[/pullquote]

Although not desirable from an editorial point of view, the advertising team is sometimes a lightning rod for clients who, despite all efforts by the magazine’s journalists, do not share the view that critical coverage is intended to improve the quality of business for all. “Clients always want Executive to talk about them as growing companies and companies where everything is going well,” explains Karine Ayoub Mattar, Gracy’s successor as head of marketing alongside Michelle Hobeika.

Having worked with the magazine since 2003, she says that clients have grown accustomed to the magazine’s style but are still not super enthusiastic about the investigative and analytical bent. “When you don’t glorify them, they prefer not to talk. If they have any issue, clients call us at the marketing department and not the journalists. This is normal because we are the people that communicate with them on a regular basis,” she says.   

The relationship of editors and advertising sales teams in news media can in many ways, even today, still be described as the fairytale tie-up of beauty and the beast. However, as is so often the reality in a matching of complementary opposites, it is not quite as clear who is beauty and who beast when one looks a little deeper into the identity of each. As paradigms of publishing are moving into very different waters from 100 years ago, the ethical interaction of business and editorial objectives by all indicators can no longer be run under the pretense of an impenetrable wall of separation but will have to understand each other’s perspectives in order to find viable ways to develop even greater editorial authenticity. And they must do this while also finding ethical models of commercial communication with today’s readers who are highly literate of the cultural and commercial environments that characterize the digital age. 

A version of this article appeared in the March print issue of Executive, Noº 200.

Anniversaries are about celebration but they should also be a time for reflection on the good, the bad and the ugly. This issue is filled with the good, including deserved tributes and acknowledgment of the work that Executive has done and continues to do. The bad and ugly, however, have been our approach to the internet. Analyzing our own digital experiences is a necessity, even if only to understand where we went wrong. We’ve had a website since 2004, but at first we viewed it more as an extension of the magazine than a platform deserving of its own care and attention. Issues went online all at once, the site got a monthly facelift with new content, and there was even a drop-down menu allowing readers to choose which issue they wanted to peruse. The drawback, of course, was that if you didn’t know in which issue we covered a certain topic, chances were you were never going to find it.

We knew this was a problem, but fixing it proved no easy task. Twice in 10 years, we redesigned the site. Our lack of in-house resources meant we could either pile an inhumane amount of work on our one qualified employee or farm the project out. Farm we did, but the results were less than ideal. The re-designed site went live in September 2012, much later than promised. By mid-2013, we realized that our site’s 2011 design already looked old and was far too heavy to easily load in Lebanon’s internet environment (download speeds, remember, were actually a bit slower back then).

[pullquote]Our goal in moving online was – and remains – finding more readers who appreciate our content[/pullquote]

Sitting together over a cup of coffee, the editorial team drew up – literally on the back of a napkin – ways to re-work our website in-house. We were so impressed with the new capabilities of inexpensive digital solutions that hit the markets around that time that we even toyed with the idea of reversing our publication philosophy by going online first (meaning our print magazine would be a “best of” compilation of stories we’d written and published during a given month).

It didn’t take long, however, before we ran into not just one but several barriers on the road to being digitally savvy. The first problem related to talent. Producing Grade A content is what we are committed to doing, and we refused to compromise on that. While we had a talented team who gave their all, it was a small team. Writing quality stories, editing them and publishing them on two platforms (print and online) was more than we could handle, not to mention the fact that proper digital content management itself needs a dedicated team, not two people who are multi-tasking at all times to keep up with their other responsibilities. Going online first would have meant either writing very short articles or having a team of writers in the double digits, as the in-depth reporting and analysis we offer takes weeks of research and writing to produce. Our goal in moving online was – and remains – finding more readers who appreciate our content, not changing our content to match Twitter trends in a cheap effort to increase traffic to our site.

We know that our future is online or bust. A perfect example of why we need to do digital, and do it right, is our wealth of content. We have an archive stretching back over 15 years. It’s a chronicle of this country’s development, a first draft of Lebanon’s recent history to borrow the second most famous cliche about journalism (the first being its practitioners are all drunks). We should be monetizing our archives. But we also need to be prudent. Recent history offers several examples of assumed sure-fire digital concepts that blew up in the faces of those who tried them – see the 2000 America Online-Time Warner merger or the 2011 iPad-only newspaper The Daily which folded after less than two years but cost an estimated $50 million. With our own small taste of failure on a seemingly simple website project between 2011 and 2013, we’re being cautious with our human and financial investments into online going forward. But we are moving forward.

Regular readers of the magazine will notice something’s different. Cleaner. Crisper. We’ve tweaked our layout, and matte paper is back for the first time since 2004. It’s a slightly new look, but we’re keeping some basic elements that define our identity. We’re a business publication. And a serious one. We write three-course meals, not light snacks. That means text. And lots of it.

“It’s easier,” Executive’s design guru Tanya Salem says of moving mountains of words around. “But I don’t like it.” Salem’s creative expression is limited to finding dignified ways to “break up the text to be easier to read,” she adds.

That’s not to say there’s no fun to be had. If page layout is our identity, covers are that identity dressed up to make the best impression. And who doesn’t love picking out clothes? Covers have static elements, and we’ve tinkered a bit, making our logo smaller and sliding it up into the left-hand corner of the page, for example. The change is not merely aesthetic. We’re freeing up real estate for the most important cover element: our message.

While people were common cover art in 1999 and 2001, we’ve never had a hard rule on what covers should look like. Rather, the results of whatever investigation we’ve undertaken that month drive our cover design choices. “What are we trying to say?” is how nearly every cover design meeting begins. Once the message is chosen, there are no restraints on the ways to represent it. We’ve done plain text. We’ve staged photos, such as when we put a colleague in a gas mask for our August 2002 cover story on environmental damage. We’ve used illustrations. We’ve used stellar work from our talented in-house photographers. We’ve even left the cover blank in a poorly organized and executed effort to encourage readers to draw their own covers. If you’re a fan of our past work, be reassured there’s plenty more to come on the design front.

Re-design is part of Executive’s visual evolution. This isn’t the first and won’t be the last. Our mission, however, remains the same.

“There is no going back,” began the cover story for Executive’s March 2011 issue. “Recent months have severed the future from past precedent and brought about a fundamental shift in the Arab paradigm.”

When we published those words, uprisings had just begun to sweep country after country across the Arab World. In response, global media outlets rushed in to broadcast “the story” to the masses around the planet – but that was never our game. From our seventh floor office near Beirut’s Adlieh roundabout, we produced coverage for the discerning reader. Our lens on the upheaval was economic. Our analysis followed the money and within our niche we were unrivaled.

For the March 2011 magazine, issue #140, we interviewed an economist at the University of Tunis El Manar, who told us that Tunisian youth – who were again marching in the streets after having driven President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali into exile just a month and a half before – would have to wait years for the inequities they rose up against to be righted.

Libya was then newly divided between the country’s east, which a rag-tag rebel movement had newly liberated, and a west where Colonel Muammar Qaddafi still held sway. Global oil prices had surged past $100 per barrel as a result and our editorial team brought to the fore how the Libyan government’s fortune – tallying in the hundreds of billions of dollars and stashed in investments in more than 130 countries around the world – would be up for grabs if Qaddafi’s 42-year-reign were brought down.

As for Egypt, we reported on how regional banks were shrugging off the potential for short-term loan defaults post-revolution in anticipation of the massive financing needs the new government would have, while Egyptians – who our team had been with in Tahrir Square when millions demonstrated to end the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak – were debating the future of their country and feverishly building new political parties to elect into the parliament.

In Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and Oman, the people had taken to the streets and squares of cities and towns, demanding just governance and a new social contract. Yet, even as the Arab world seemed alight from end-to-end when Executive hit Lebanese newsstands March 1, just a two-and-a-half hour drive away in Damascus, calm prevailed. Syria was different. The regime’s power seemed absolute. An uprising there was impossible. Until it happened.

A Damascene shopkeeper – speaking to our reporter who went in the next month to covertly cover the unrest – made it a point to remind us that Syria was still different.

“They will kill millions to hold onto power. Millions,” he said. “This is not Egypt.”

We documented how the rural areas in Syria that first rose up were the same ones that had been the worst affected by the government’s repeal of farm subsidies, or where small-scale artisans had been driven out of business en masse by trade liberalization with Turkey. As protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad spread across the country we followed how the economy retreated, unemployment surged and the Syrian Central Bank began burning through its foreign currency reserves to prop up the sinking Syrian pound.

[pullquote]Our lens on the upheaval was economic. Our analysis followed the money and within our niche we were unrivaled[/pullquote]

The more viciously and violently the regime tried to quash the peaceful protest movement, the bigger the demonstrations became. Within months media around the world began to speculate about the imminent collapse of the regime. But it withstood, and as the opposition tired of being butchered in the streets, at Executive we traced the rising price of weapons on Lebanon’s black market, fueled by groups in Syria who were rallying to arms.

In contrast to Libya – where western countries quickly secured a United Nations Security Council resolution for a “no-fly zone” and then bombed Qaddafi’s ground forces to make way for a rebel advance – the West “has generally limited its stance to the unrest in Syria with repeated calls for Assad to reform or face losing his legitimacy,” one of our comment writers noted in Executive’s August 2011 issue. “We don’t want to go for the option of an armed struggle against the regime,” the same writer quoted a Syrian activist as saying in our October 2011 issue, “but if the international community does not step in, we are afraid that it will lead to civil war.”

Five years later I look back at the words we published in March 2011, and they now echo hauntingly: “What was the status quo is now dead, trampled beneath the feet of millions marching through the streets. And while it is yet far from certain that freedom and democracy await them at the end of this road, what is assured is that where they are going is radically different from the place they left. Welcome to the new Arab World.”

Spencer Osberg was editor of Executive from 2009 to 2013