The infrastructure — both physical and commercial — was heavily reliant on expatriates at all levels with a significant proportion of the management and technical operators from Europe and America.
There was a perceived demand for a newspaper in English that communicated solid news from abroad for the expatriate community and the developing stratum of Saudi managers and technicians. Saudi Arabia was no longer the isolated desert country filled with “strange folk” regarded as the Middle Eastern version of America’s 19th century “wild west.”
The Gulf States sat on 47 percent of the world’s known oil reserves in 1975 and clearly would become a force on the economic stage and one to be treated with the respect its expanding economic stature demanded.
Oil prices surged upward in 1975 and enabled the financing of the enormous infrastructure projects that would sustain and support the Kingdom. To carry out the projects, an influx of foreign labor and expertise flooded into the Kingdom.
The character of the readership in the first decade was defined by the interests of the expatriate workers — money. They came to work, earn money and invest it either in their native countries or, more generally, in world markets. The paper did not have a clearly defined “business” section but consisted of news reports, many dealing with business affairs and the countries involved in the development of the country.
The multinational spread of the sources of articles reflected the polyglot nature of the workforce and the interest in business news from outside the Kingdom. There was a serious, crisp, no-nonsense style of reportage with few opinion pieces outside the editorial.
Sports and local news were at a minmum; the readers wanted to know what was going on in business and Arab News provided the information. Of particular interest were the currency and bullion price columns and later, the world stock market reports.
After the first five years, the readership had not changed much. In June 1980, for example, the paper carried not a single article about third world communities — many of whose nationals provided the physical muscle to drive the economy.
As the demographics of the readership began to change and the paper had to compete with television, 1982 saw Arab News with defined sections that indicated the readership wanted more than just business news.
The newspaper was divided into: Local; Middle East, Features, Editorial, International; Economy; Family and Sport (golf, cricket, Formula One, football, and occasionally boxing and baseball).
Still the articles reflected a Western readership; advertisements indicated much the same with offers of luxury foreign travel and expensive consumer items — especially jewelry and watches.
What was different from the 1970s editions of the paper was that there was a noticeable increase in stories from the Middle East.
They would surely have been of interest to Western readers, and there seems to have been more than enough to satisfy them.
It indicated an increasing interest from a local readership that was drawn from the Middle East and suggested an increase in the engagement of English-enabled middle management taking up positions in the Saudi economic infrastructure.
Palestine, Israel and Lebanon all figured frequently in the news. Generally, business had become concentrated in the business section and the dedicated sections offered a growing readership a varied diet.
Arab News began to run features regularly and many were on particular countries or international stories that resonated with the increasingly diverse mix of nationalities in the Kingdom. Generally though, the focus was news and the style was short, gritty news stories of around 300 words and plenty of them covering a wide range of local and particularly, international, subjects.
The spread of stories continued unchanged for a few years, but by 1987 changes in Arab News readers and their interests were apparent. Health had raised its head and was now a regular feature and the entertainment section, once limited to reviews of Western films and music, had spread to include Algerian/Arabic performances, “the Singing Sensation of the Philippines (Kuh Ledesma),” Turkish cinema and reviews of Indonesian films.
In one advertisement, Sony touted their new flat screen television in four languages: Sinhalese, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic. Sony is a company that does its marketing homework and the advertisement demonstrated that there was a growing market in the Kingdom with disposable income — and it was no longer only all wealthy Westerners.
The gradual widening of readership interest continued although the number of different national communities may not have.
A section on the environment became an occasional visitor to the features page but a real ‘thin end of the wedge’ appeared in 1995, with the paper taking the lead in encouraging the Filipino community that organized and participated in various sports acclivities.
This encouragement continues to this day. These energetic people seem to have an unquenchable enthusiasm for sport, and they have made themselves completely at home in the Kingdom and on the pages of the Arab News.
By April 1999, whole pages of sports weekly were dedicated to Filipino sport, some in the Philippines and some in the Kingdom, joining the international sports roundup.
Cricket, played mostly by the South Asian expatriates, too was given wide space in the sports pages. Local leagues in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam were covered in full in these Friday sports weekly.
The coverage of bowling, basketball and cricket, the sports played by the majority of expatriates, enabled Arab News gain a legion of readers, many of whom are still committed to the green newspaper.
Mideast and Africa, UK and Europe, US and Americas, Philippines, Pakistan, India, International pages were now standard fare and Arab News catered for almost all the many national groups in the Kingdom in some way, either through features or in news stories. There really was something for everyone.
In 2001 an important event in the life of Arab News and its readership occurred.
On Jan. 1, the Arab News went online. It transformed the demographics of readership from local to multinational quite literally overnight. Instead of the physically limited print edition — with a national circulation figure of about the same as the UK’s Nottingham Evening Post — the paper suddenly became available worldwide.
The events of 9/11 and the ensuing conflict boosted the e-edition figures and importance to the wider world. Arab News had gone global.
In 2009, the paper had more than 153 million hits on its website. Now redesigned with easier access, a new look and good archiving, expectations are high that this number will rise rapidly. The second event was that the Saudi Stock Exchange opened. Known locally by its Arabic name — Tadawul — it was, and is, the largest securities exchange in the Middle East and more than twice the size in market capitalization of the second-ranked Kuwait Stock Exchange.
It became an immediate focus of interest with all the machinations and movements recorded and produced a new generation of stock-savvy readers. Regular features on investment and business in the Kingdom followed in short order.
Then came the Pinoy Xtra. With the first issue on June 12, 2004, Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena said in a message on the front page: “It was a gift on the occasion of the Philippine Independence Day to all overseas Filipinos for having patronized Arab News all these years.” It also reflected the size and importance of the Filipino community to the life of the Kingdom and has been running weekly ever since.
In 2003, Wall Street Journal was added to the economic mix. The sports section had taken on a life of its own. And so the Arab News continues with a mix of the serious, investigative, informed and sometimes outrageously joyous celebration of life in the Kingdom and its own perspective.
Happy with the local cognomen of the “Green Truth” it truly came of age during the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. There was a day when our own correspondent in Baghdad, not embedded with coalition troops, had been sending in telephone reports of what was actually happening. Finally, the news services began quoting Arab News in their reports, a total reversal of the normal process.
We had come of age as a respected source of information and that, as a short surf on the web will testify, still applies.
Thirty-five years has seen the “Green Truth” develop and mature from a parochial narrow interest paper to a global e-paper and a respected source of news.
By the time we reach the half-century, there will in all likelihood be no “Green Truth” print edition to research for articles, just the e-edition.
