JEDDAH, 6 March 2005 — Girls from Al-Hamra High School visited Arab News as part of their school program to develop reporting and production techniques for their newspaper. The 11 students, aged between 14 and 18, were accompanied by four teachers. They met with Arab News Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena, journalists and editors and had a conducted tour of the newspaper’s facilities.
Drawing on his experience of working with the media around the world, Almaeena introduced the visitors to the principles of reporting and the limits of newspaper coverage. He outlined the role and obligation of newspapers as distributors of information and opinion-formers within the society they operate in.
Based on the students’ experience at having produced their first copy of their own newspaper — which ranges over science, politics and general topics — they fired perceptive and well-informed questions at Arab News staffers. Of particular interest were guidelines for investigative reporting and interviewing.
Somayya Jabarti responded to questions about the potential difficulties for women journalists. She outlined some of the difficulties they were likely to encounter — access to sources and the restriction of movement — but opined that the major problems that female journalists encountered were self-imposed.
Saad Al-Matrafi talked the students through the news process — from story gathering via writing, copy editing and final page assembly.
The visitors came equipped with notebooks and video-recording equipment, demonstrating a promising potential for accuracy in collecting their information.
As part of the session in the newsroom, their photograph was taken, processed and put on a proof copy of yesterday’s front page as they watched and clamored for details of the page-making operation. Each student received a printout as a souvenir of the visit.
The students told Arab News that feedback from their newspaper’s readership had indicated that the exercise had stimulated thinking, widened the horizons of both contributors and readers and had laid the foundations for the second edition.
