The Lebanese journalistic media and advertising industry today are sharing a single berth in a slow boat to an uncertain future. It has been a rough ride, and even taking into consideration the most optimistic estimates, it is not expected to turn into a pleasure cruise for at least another 18 months.
With a few positive exceptions – this magazine having the pleasant experience of being among them – the country’s print and even audiovisual media outlets have seen advertising revenue dwindle and hover at unsustainable levels. For at least three years now, adspend on the national level was depressed, and, by best estimates, did not exceed $70 million. The largest share went to television advertising and then to print, outdoor media and finally radio. It is no secret that this revenue should only able to feed one or perhaps two TV stations, less than a handful of dailies and a smallish bouquet of other print media. Yet, a glance at the list of active print media kept at the publishers’ syndicate at the Lebanese Order of the Press shows that there are over 200 periodicals registered and running under non-political licenses. Those with a coveted political license number 30 to 35.
Even more bizarre, is that fact that these figures seem quite modest when compared to the total number of non-political and political licenses on record (including non-operational licenses) at the syndicate, which total 1,400 and 110, respectively. But it is still a considerable amount when measured against the size of the Lebanese market. And it decidedly humongous when viewed against the print media’s share of 25% to 30% of the adspend pie, knowing that advertising revenue is the economic lifeblood of not only broadcasters and magazines but also daily print publications.
The one daily newspaper with a different recent experience could be Al Balad, which claimed after its first year on the market that its readership reach had grown to nearly 40% of all newspaper readers and over 16% of all Lebanese above 15 years of age. The newspaper said at the end of January that its circulation is about 35,000, a figure about a third below the 50,000 free three-month trial subscriptions it placed on the market in its launch phase but definitely impressive by Beirut standards.
One may want to remember in this context, though, that the ad industry’s professional media buyers here have long grown wary of print-run claims by any media. Liberal inflation of circulation figures is one of the industry’s more notorious habits, even if they are held in check by independent audit firms and liability issues. Professional audit firms in the sector – whose business it is to monitor media – are fighting for a change of these practices in the Middle East, most recently at a publishing conference held last month in Dubai. They never tire to tell publishers that fake circulation muscles only lead to the deflation of rate card values and harm their business in the long run as badly as steroids harm an athlete.
For the journalism side of many Lebanese publications, the economic reality of the past five years has been shattering. Publishers could rarely afford to invest into newsroom training or staff increases. Numerous magazines were forced to operate with skeletal editorial staff; and at struggling dailies, one finds veteran journalists who were denied salary raises for six or more years in a row.
Although professionalism is not entirely lacking from the trade, the results were discouraging. “Professional journalists do not get support from their employers. Novices lack proper basic training,” assessed Magda Abu-Fadil, director of the Institute for Professional Journalists at the Lebanese American University.
From the employer perspective, these were scary years in which survival took precedence over improvements of quality. From the employee perspective, it was a scary job market in which publishers could dictate conditions. Overall, only the most enthusiastic or longsuffering media owners, editors and journalists seemed able to keep their eyes on the ambitions of delivering authentic journalism.
What has not helped the situation is the constant onslaught of partisan mentalities at media outlets, invading from both business and political angles. The malaise seems almost hereditary in the political press where more courageous journalists sometimes admitted that over many years they saw no escape from prostituting themselves to those in power. But under their economic pressures, newspaper and periodical publishers – who were justifiably worried over their advertising sales – would increasingly succumb to stroking their ad clients with unwarranted editorial niceties or they might swing to another version of anti-journalism by refusing to cover newsworthy events at companies if ad space was not secured before hand. Media outlets lending themselves excessively to such practices did not only drive their own professional reputation into the lowest basement, they would also give the entire realm of journalism an image of disrepute with advertisers.
The saving grace for Lebanese journalism in the past used to be that media exhibited a relatively high level of integrity. They might have bowed less or more deeply to political and business interests – but they did not prostrate themselves so relentlessly as media in other Arab countries. Journalism practitioners and theoreticists here maintain that Lebanon still enjoys a relative large margin of press freedom. In the words of Abu-Fadil, media here are “not entirely free but reasonably free.”
The diversity of views and open debate of issues in the political publications and audiovisual media indeed continues to thrive around the campfires of Lebanon’s intelligentsia, despite the limited number of political licenses and the odd incidence of intimidation, temporary clampdown of publications and arrest of publishers. Although the intrusions were grave, they were not unbearable for the media, maintained one journalist from a family embedded in the national newspaper culture, who added that the most notorious case, the forced closure of television station Murr TV, followed the letter of the media law, indicating more a negligence in drafting of the law rather blatant and willful abuse of it.
However, the diversity of Lebanese media should not be seen as a sector struggling towards Volatire’s ideal. Rather it reflects the multi-faceted rivalries of the country’s multi-communal society, noted Ramez Maluf, director of the Beirut Institute for Media Arts, a journalism institution also located at the Lebanese American University. In this perception, media might exist in a frame of diversity but are partisan at the core, which hints that many in the field would find nothing objectionable in seeing their opponents’ freedom of expression curtailed.
This state of journalism in Lebanon also transpires in the preoccupation of the local media with the petty affairs of politics, and this lowers the ability of Lebanese media to garner respect for their coverage of Middle Eastern affairs, Maluf said. As media based in the Gulf region are becoming more active and numerous, they are more successful than Beirut-based journalism in attracting audiences on the Arab peninsula because of their greater coverage of Arab affairs and Arab interests. This is especially visible in the satellite television market, where the news broadcasts by Lebanese channels such as LBC/Hayat and Future are less of a reference than those of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two Gulf-based 24-hour news channels.
Consequently, the fact that job opportunities for graduates of the LAU journalism programs saw an upswing in the last two years was not driven by local demand. For the most recent class of journalism graduates, Maluf claimed most positions could be found “rather easily if they were willing to relocate.”
The remaining area of Lebanese media dominance is entertainment, usually fairly removed from all things journalism. Thus, a batch of young aspiring media career starters here recently considered themselves lucky to have the chance to work on the production of programs like Star Academy, where their responsibility consisted largely of switching cameras on and off whenever the participants in the show would discuss dangerous topics, e.g. politics or religion.
The reality TV surge of the recent past in Lebanon may fit the national tastes but it still can be expected to taper off and settle in a less prominent space in the entertainment industry. On journalistic terms, Lebanese media thus might find growth in the coming years in their own domestic market and backyard of local coverage, provided that the nation’s political and economic life gains a surer footing following the decisive election processes this summer. This notwithstanding, however, the Lebanese media experience of being the regional benchmark seems on the way out, except for those productions and social publications where the country’s comparative liberalism gives it an edge over other Middle Eastern locations.
Does that mean that the Gulf, specifically media locations in Dubai and Qatar, can be expected to step in to the role of centers in serious journalism? The UAE would certainly like to. When staging last month what was billed as the inaugural Middle East Publishing Conference, officials of the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone and the Dubai Consultancy, Research and Media Centre enthused full power about their business location when addressing the, by organizer estimates, 300 participants at the event that had been co-sponsored by two international associations for newspaper and magazine publishers.
Announcing in by now habitual fashion another mega-project – this time a $70 million Publishing Pavilion at the emerging $270 million International Media Production Zone in Dubai – the UAE executives dangled utopian numbers in front of publishers by boasting a target potential of 300 million people for print and publishing ventures in the region and throw in another 2 billion potential customers between Tehran and Dhaka.
Dubai may have been “bigging-it-up” at the conference but it was left to a Lebanese, As-Safir’s Talal Salman, to offer words of caution of a profound Arab media crisis, which he attributed to the “emptiness of the political role in the Arab world.”
The absence of real figures was the greatest weakness at the conference, commented Lebanese journalist and publishing entrepreneur Khaled Kassar, one of very few to attend the $1,000 per participant event from Beirut. “I went to the conference expecting to get data and studies about the region, but that was lacking,” he said.
The most meaningful numbers on the Gulf media evolution presented at the event came when Ahmad ibn Byat, director general of the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone, told participants that publishing activities in the UAE grew by 42% over the past two years, with anticipation of future growth at 15 to 30%. Byat also said that Dubai has been at the forefront of creating the infrastructure and conditions for the expansion of the publishing industry and that publishing has reached a stage of maturity in the Middle East.
This is exactly what sober observers of the media environment from all sides – advertising, publishing, and journalism – in this town doubt. “I have yet to see real press freedom practiced there,” said Abu-Fadil about the Gulf region. The very creation of a free zone is a sign of an anomaly that betrays problems with press freedom, said Eli Khoury, CEO/CCO of Saatchi & Saatchi Levant in an interview with Executive. And Lebanese journalists who had migrated from Beirut to Dubai told of increasing competitive pressures and climbing living expenses in the emirate, but not of increasing press freedom. All that, as true as it rings, does not indicate that the Lebanese media can take it easy.
