In this part of the world, the only media that thrives today is business journalism, simply because there are no longer big political projects. From Egypt to the UAE, the biggest projects around us are all economic in nature, and all of these schemes should deliver big goals by 2030 or 2035.

Unfortunately, business journalism isn’t an old profession. Only very recently has everyone started taking it seriously, and we are seeing great investments in business media organizations such as the launch of Asharq Business with Bloomberg TV, with more set to come.

Too many business reporters are no more than amateurs who are trying to make noise, and many other business media are little more than outlets for press releases and corporate announcements. 

I suspect that up to 60 percent of daily business media content originates in PR agencies and corporate communications departments, so making an original splash is rare.

It’s hard to do, because making original content about a company can take up to a month, and sometimes even longer. From the time the reporter sends the questions to its media representatives to them eventually getting a response can stretch on forever. I’m not convinced that a reporter can wait this long.

It’s even harder to get hold of a spokesman with government agencies, which may take up to a week. I know a spokesman who never responds to WhatsApp messages from reporters, but, ironically, he spends considerable time posting messages in WhatsApp groups to lecture other PR practitioners on the right ways to approach the media. He even spends plenty of time writing columns about media affairs. If someone like him does his job, we wouldn’t be in need of his columns.

But what really bothers me the most about being a business journalist is the widespread anchoring bias among officials, executives, and PR departments. Just because it wasn’t done properly in the past, and we all know why (this needs another article in itself), it doesn’t mean it will never be done properly. 

All reporters are just about smart enough to know the difference between revenues and net profits. Business reporters were never trained well, but that doesn’t mean they all know nothing.

This brings me to my next point, which is about writing analysis and columns. From my experience, if the writer of a column is a journalist or doesn’t hold a PhD, then most likely they will be looked at as someone who does not know anything.

So this means that I’m someone who knows nothing, but I would still like to waste the time of some top officials with my unimportant views.

I’ll put my advice to planners and state officials very simply: Let’s stop chasing the rest of the world and think outside of the box. We don’t need to close the gap, we need to create new sectors every day. This “chase mentality” won’t help the economy.

I’ll give two examples. The first is the car industry, the second is start-ups. Saudi Arabian officials had this long-time obsession of opening up car assembly facilities in the Kingdom. It’s becoming a matter of national pride, and every time an official says that a car manufacturer will soon open a plant in the Kingdom, the people start celebrating on social media. 

I know how this is important for a country that has petrochemical companies that want to sell more plastics to these car makers and to create local jobs.

Let’s understand that waking up late now and trying to do so with combustion-engine vehicles at a time when the world has already advanced in shifting to electrical vehicles won’t take us anywhere in the future. That’s because Saudi officials’ minds are mainly shaped by investing in the present, whereas they should be investing in the future. 

Instead of looking for fields where no one has ever gone, officials who control state-owned companies only care about investing in current markets and creating jobs. That’s not a sound business model. But you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, so you can’t change the mentality of people who spent years in the public sector and never experienced the private sector or held an investor conference call every quarter to explain to them what exactly they are doing with their money.

The second example is start-ups. We all love this word now in Saudi Arabia and we keep saying it every day, and we want to increase the share of these businesses in GDP. That’s all great and good, but having one million start-ups doesn’t mean a lot of them are all selling cupcakes or coffee over apps. Numbers don’t matter, impact does. 

How many of these new companies are turning into unicorns? How many of them are being bought by the big players such as Andreessen Horowitz, BVP, BlackRock, and BlackStone? Again, we are still chasing a percentage of SMEs contribution in GDP for the US or some G20 economy.

Saudi Arabia can’t build an economy based on chasing and benchmarking alone, and Saudi officials need to stop this game that consultancy firms have taught them. Benchmarking isn’t the right tool when you embark on a journey that no one did before. But to be able to think properly, Saudi youth need to learn in universities how to think outside the box. 

This needs a revamp of the education system, as the current system can only teach Saudis how to be uncreative employees.

I guess I’ve said a lot for someone who knows nothing.

• Wael Mahdi is an independent energy commentator specializing on OPEC and a co-author of ‘OPEC in a Shale Oil World: Where to Next?’

Twitter: @waelmahdi