Saudi Gazette report JUBAIL — The industrial powerhouse of Saudi Arabia was the fitting venue for an exposition of the position and bold plans for the Saudi Gazette for the coming years. Under new editorial management since mid 2012, the newspaper has been transformed into a multi-platform publication that will address the changing age and social demographics of the developing Saudi Arabia. “The Gazette will be a paper relevant to all who read it,” said Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena who has overseen the huge changes in the format, content and stance of the newspaper in the last nine months. “We are not a publication that will instruct, but more a response to listening to the voice of the people who form our readership. We will reflect their concerns.” In a presentation detailing the progress of the Saudi Gazette, guests were guided through the details of the development of the publication. The target audience for the new style Gazette would not be restricted to English speaking residents of the Kingdom alone, but take into account the development of the new Saudi middle class of educated and inquiring people with an awareness of the changes taking place in the Kingdom. The spread, however, is wider than simple in this social stratum, it takes in the local and international business community that has interests in the Kingdom and most particularly, the electronic and media savvy Saudi younger generation. The Gazette's progress in this area Almaeena noted was reflected in the 1,000 percent plus increase in Facebook fans and 621 percent increase in Twitter followers since the new management took over. Moreover, impressive though the 134 percent increase in general web-readership was, Almaeena was at pains to note that the 191 percent increase in unique web-hits, by users who sought out the Saudi Gazette specifically and were not guided in by chance links, was very significant as it indicated a keenness to locate a readable and reliable source of information. The presentation showed the plans for 2013 for the publication and reviewed some of the themed pages that would address particular interest groups including education, energy, water and a particular emphasis on the concerns of young people. “The pace of the media industry is escalating exponentially. A newspaper today isn't just a “Paper”. It is a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, an interactive website, an aggregator, an audio and visual broadcast, an application for smart-phones,” affirmed Almaeena. Summing up a remarkable few months in the history of the Saudi Gazette, the presentation revealed an independent accolade that Almaeena believed hallmarked the progress of the Gazette as genuine. For the first time, the newspaper entered the Forbes Middle East listings and came in with something of a fanfare. Visitor numbers ranked the Gazette in the top ten websites in the Middle East, at 35 in the top online newspapers in the MENA region for 2012 and 34 in the list of entities with social media presence in the MENA region for 2012. “This is not what we say,” said Almaeena, ”It what other people say. And we have only just begun.”
