Arab media content is gaining popularity as new TV channels and Arab digital media are on the rise, but decision-makers expressed at a public forum held Tuesday concerns over measuring audience figures and a media "overkill."

Speaking at a round-table discussion organized by the Dubai media free zone Tecom and the Dubai Press Club, Mohamed Burhan, CEO of business news channel CNBC Arabia, said that "only media organizations with a full range of news channels with TV reports, website content and smart-phone applications, like CNBC Arabia offers, will survive the competition."

In order to illustrate the degree of rivalry in the area from Morocco to Iraq, Burhan added that "there are 645 Arab TV stations and 15 of them earn three quarters of entire advertising volumes spent in the Middle East and North Africa."

This led Bilal Hijjawi, managing editor of monthly magazine Fortune Arabia, to express serious concerns on whether Arab media organizations really reach their target audience. "There is no independent media monitoring body in the Arab world which measures the readership of a magazine, a news channel or a website. Arab media is tapping in the dark."

Hijjawi told the audience, some 100 media professionals gathering in Dubai's Shangri-La hotel, that an English media auditor stopped to do monitor services in Dubai some years ago because they could not get sincere audience figures from the industry.

Mamoon Sbeih, managing director of public relations firm APCO Worldwide - Arab Region, who moderated the panel discussion, proposed the creation of a "chief digital officer" at media firms who shall be responsible to implement a strategy for content on websites, smart-phones and tablets and shall have the role of observing the performance of the same.

CNBC Arabia's CEO Burhan welcomed that a digital strategy must be part of any CEO's job, rather than a separate expert on the management board.

Shadi Al-Hassan, founder and managing director of Flagship Projects in Dubai, a Tecom-based firm which develops digital media applications, agreed by saying that "Arab content relied on topics relevant to local communities. The content strategy is part of the decision-makers' (job). They must work together with content providers to create quality and distinct content."

All panel members agreed that the Arab world shall not simply replicate Western content or Western business models, as the share of a young tech-savvy population in the Arab world is much larger than in Europe or the United States, and the Arab turmoil made local content produced by local media more important than ever.

The debate triggered a lively question-and-answer session. Francis Mathew, editor-at-large at the Gulf region's largest English daily Gulf News, said at the session that local content was developing well, but legally it became more and more difficult to protect intellectual property rights with the spread of digital media.

"At Gulf News we produce some 300 news stories per day. But many of our stories are taken by other media. A well-known Arabian business magazine, for example, takes up to 40 pieces of news from us and posts them on their website," Mathew said.

"We are not against being quoted like 'Gulf news said...', but we can't accept theft as this is illegal and we have to pay our journalists, the news agencies and we have to cover operational costs," he said.

Mathew, a Briton who has been working in the Dubai media industry for over two decades, said that "we took a number of disputes to the Dubai courts."

Asked by Xinhua if the laws on media content and property rights were not clear, he said that "This is not the issue. The laws exists and they are clear. What we need is enforcement of the laws by the courts."

(Source: Xinhua)