Will the WSJ follow the FT to Abu Dhabi?

Will the now Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal be able to resist the challenge thrown down by the Financial Times this week by announcing that its first Middle East edition will launch on April 29?

CEO John Ridding told Reuters: ‘The economic dynamism of the region is striking. It’s not just the rate of growth. It’s the nature of growth. Unlike the previous sort of oil booms, I think what we’re seeing this time is a substantial investment in the foundations of sustainable economic development, infrastructure and education’.

New edition

Apparently the English-language paper’s editorial staff will be based in Abu Dhabi. The paper will be produced in London and printed in Dubai. In fact, the Financial Times has been printing its Asia edition in Dubai for more than a year.

You can find the unread copies stacked up in the local Spinneys supermarket, alongside unsold copies of the The Times and Sunday Times, also locally printed versions of London newspapers.

The plain fact is that the Gulf does not want to read London newspapers, and adding a few more local stories is not going to help improve this editorial reality.

If you live and work in the Gulf you have some good local newspapers – Gulf News, Emirates Business and now the new National – why would you want to read the incredibly dull and often behind-the-times Financial Times?

But in this sort of media frenzy then should we not expect to see the venerable Wall Street Journal on the streets of the GCC States? Its format is at least less-wordy, with small paragraph items and easier to read for people with English as a second language.

And what of the advertising petrodollars that presumably attracts the big media to these shores? Well, local advertisers tend to like to appear in papers that are read or at least glanced at, but they may try a new media for novelty value.

Attention seeking

So desperate for attention are property companies amid intense competition that they increasingly wrap the local papers in four-page adverts which you have to throw away without looking in the morning before you can get to your news.

It is quite obviously self-evident that the region is seeing ‘substantial investment in the foundations of sustainable economic development, infrastructure and education’. But whether that means every newspaper in the world can turn a local edition into a profitable enterprise remains less sure.

What I have to ask is do they know anything about this region or really add value to local editorial content?