As expatriates started arriving in the Kingdom in greater numbers in the 70s, Hisham Ali Hafiz and his brother Muhammad spotted a niche in the media sector.

Their brainchild was a new paper, primarily aimed at this community of foreign workers.

As they sat planning the first edition of Arab News some 40 years ago, it really must have been hard to believe just how much technology would affect the news industry.

Today, Arab News content is distributed across multiple platforms and channels, reaching millions.

The growth of the Internet over the past decade has meant that news brands have had to change the way they operate in order to survive. Those papers who showed a greater resistance to change, fighting against a new reality, failed dramatically.

During this time, news of closures for historically successful papers were all too common.

Fortunately, here in the Kingdom the trend away from print and on to digital appears to be a little slower than in other parts of the world. Publications that made hard decisions during this time are still around.

It’s clear that no publication has found an entirely winning formula for digital success but but good content and investment in innovation will lead to new ways of giving readers what they want, which is what all successful brands do best. It is exactly this that Arab News has been striving to achieve over the last few years.

Readers are the most important part of a news organization.

When journalists sit down in front of their computers, each word they write and each sentence they construct is to convey something meaningful to their readers.

They toil for those consuming their content. They put them first.

It was for this reason that Arab News launched a website in 2001.

The first incarnation was extremely simple. In the following years, there was a major site overhaul, introducing new features and providing even more of the content being produced daily.

For the first time, site updates were done throughout the day instead of when the print edition was finished.

These improvements were cheered by readers who felt increasingly part of the Arab News community. The site thus became a first port of call for local news in the English language in the Kingdom, boosting pageviews.

As readers began to use sites like Facebook and Twitter, it became vitally important for Arab News to adapt and to go where readers were.

So, a Facebook page and a twitter account were launched. These became a tremendous success and provided a further platform for readers to discuss and share the publication’s content.

With the number of fans rapidly approaching two million, the Arab News Facebook page has clearly fostered a community who really care about the issues that are covered.

The page is now the number one in the Middle East when compared to similar brands.

The pace of digital advancement makes it extremely difficult to predict exactly how the news industry will look in the next 40 years, but by continuing to put the readers at the heart of its growth, this publication will continue to have an exciting future.