THINK!: Media Hubs in the UAE

Question: If you throw a lavish, all expenses paid launch for your new media hub in the UAE will it do the job of drowning out any reference to the already existing Dubai Media City?

Answer: judging by the NYT piece below on last Sunday's shindig, the answer is yes. It's down to a blogger (not me but the Kipp Report) to raise the fundamental questions about what will now be the third media hub in the UAE. I'll begin with the NYT piece, show you the blog and introduce you to DMC.

Question: Did anyone in the senior management of the NYTMG attend the opening of the Abu Dhabi Media Park?

Answer: according to my sources, yes.

See below or click here for more on the different strategies between the Abu Dhabi Media Park and the already existing Dub

Reaching for a higher profile, Abu Dhabi opens a hub for Western media

By Tim Arango (NYT/IHT)
Monday, October 13, 2008
Twenty years ago, Abu Dhabi's cultural cachet in the West was as a punch line in the cartoon "Garfield." Today, backed with petrodollars, Abu Dhabi is fast becoming an international cultural hub and attracting American media companies.
On Sunday, a spate of companies announced that they were setting up shop in Abu Dhabi, an island city that is the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The companies are CNN, the book publishers HarperCollins and Random House, the BBC, The Financial Times and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity arm of the financial news giant Thomson Reuters.
Officials from these companies joined local officials in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to announce they would take space on a new 200,000-square-meter campus, called the Abu Dhabi Media Zone, that the government is building for foreign media companies.
The campus is intended to be an incubator that will mix Western media companies with billions in Middle Eastern oil money. It will offer training programs for journalists and filmmakers from the region but, more important, it will be a base for Western companies to do business in the region — and at the same time help the Abu Dhabi government reach its goal of becoming a cultural and media center of the Middle East.
"For most Western content companies, this region has not been fully engaged with," said Wayne Borg, a former Universal Studios executive who is chief operating officer of Abu Dhabi Media Zone, which is changing its name to twofour54 Abu Dhabi — a reference to the city's geographical coordinates. "There is certainly a market opportunity here. This region is a growth story."
This is the third major investment in media undertaken by Abu Dhabi recently. Another arm of the government, the Abu Dhabi Media Company, last year agreed to a $1 billion deal to make video games and movies with Warner Brothers, the Hollywood studio owned by Time Warner. More recently, the company announced it would spend $1 billion to start a film financing offshoot that will invest in Hollywood-style movies for English-speaking audiences.
For CNN the move amounts to a significant investment in the region — a big step beyond its announcement last year that it would expand its international news gathering and add a correspondent in Abu Dhabi. CNN plans to move close to 30 staff members to the city and begin broadcasting a daily prime-time news show from Abu Dhabi on CNN International. Abu Dhabi becomes the fourth international outpost for CNN in which it can produce studio broadcasts, the others being London, Hong Kong and Mexico City.
"News organizations, for a variety of reasons, have been cutting back," said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide. "We think it's critical to invest. This is a pretty sizable investment for us."
HarperCollins, the book publishing division of the News Corporation, is establishing a presence in Abu Dhabi to capitalize on what the company says is growth in the sale of English-language books in the Middle East. Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said the book publisher signed on to "explore the potential of the area and forge relationships."
With credit markets tight, the Middle East could become an increasingly important source of funds for Hollywood. Last week, as tumult continued on Wall Street, the Abu Dhabi government held its second annual Circle Conference, a gathering of investors, movie executives and producers in which the Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman, Jim Gianopulos, gave the keynote speech. That conference was followed by the Middle East International Film Festival, hosted by Abu Dhabi.
Michael Young, provost for the New York Film Academy, which opened a campus in Abu Dhabi in February, said, "I can't think of a place where there's more enthusiasm for film and film education."
Nor, perhaps, a place where there is more money to be spent by the government in creating an environment for the arts. In addition to the $2 billion the country has committed to Hollywood through the Abu Dhabi Media Company, the country has lured the Louvre and Guggenheim museums to establish outposts there, and established The National, an English-language broadsheet newspaper in Abu Dhabi.
All of this raises questions of whether the government, which is building the state-of-the-art facility, would exert control of the media — an idea antithetical to traditions in the United States and Western Europe. "Creatively, I have not seen any kinds of limitations," Young said.
Walton said CNN was paying for its space. "We're very mindful of protecting the CNN brand," he said. "We can't have anyone influence our editorial."
Borg, who runs the media center's day-to-day operations, said the government offered space "at negotiable rates."
Monique Villa, the chief executive of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which will use its space to teach journalism skills to participants from around the region, said she was not worried about the country's lack of press freedoms. Last month, journalists there held the first UAE Press Freedom Day, seeking more openness from the government and more access to information.
"What we would expect is that we would be able to train them like we have in other parts of the world," she said.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/business/13deal.php

Nice party, decent hotel, upgrade on Emirates, had a chat with everyone there, no mention of DMC. Good weekend in all.

Actually there isn't a UAE byline, NYT won't accept freebies, so in fact no nice party, no decent hotel, no upgrade on Emirates but nevertheless the Abu Dhadi PR machine kept him nicely on message.

Abu Dhabi plans new media zone

posted on 13/10/2008

Arabic films, documentaries, music, print and digital media content will soon be made available to the Arab world from the capital, as part of a new media content creation zone unveiled in the capital on Sunday. General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, attended the launch ceremony. The Abu Dhabi Media Zone Authority, which will be called ‘twofour54', would start operating by the beginning of 2009, and represent the geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude) of Abu Dhabi. It will offer production facilities, infrastructure, training and a new business incubator for the development of world-class Arabic content by people from the Middle East region for its 300 million Arab audience. Some of the biggest names in the international media industry, including CNN, BBC, Thompson Foundation, Random House, Harper Collins, Rotana Studies, Financial Times, Abu Dhabi Media Company, C Sky Pictures and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, will be setting up offices there. Speaking at the launch, the Chief Executive Officer of twofour54, Tony Orsten, said twofour54 would provide a collaborative campus where all types of media companies would work together. "The Abu Dhabi 2030 vision seeks to establish the emirate as a regional centre for culture with a ‘global capital city' as its hub. An extremely important part of achieving this vision lies in creating a thriving international media industry which, to be successful, needs to be local at the same time,” he said. Orsten explained that Arab students and media professionals from around the world can apply to the twofour54 training programme, which distinguishes the twofour54 from other media zones in the region, and stressed that twofour54 will not influence the content of media productions. Most of the content produced will be in Arabic. There would be some English content as well. "There is no underlying ideology that guides our work, and we do not have any opinions regarding what should be produced. We want to enable and give Arabs opportunities to raise the quality of Arab media content,” he said. Twofour54 is built around four pillars — twofour54 tadreeb (training), twofour54 ibtikar (innovation) , twofour54 intaj (production) and twofour54 tawasol (communication). Twofour54 tadreeb will be the region's premier vocational training academy, targeting young Arabs and graduates considering a career in media industry as well as providing existing media and entertainment professionals with opportunities to develop skills across a comprehensive range of media and content industry disciplines. Twofour54 ibtikar will provide innovational support and funding promising creative ideas across print, online, mobile and television platforms in the Middle East and North Africa region. Twofour54 intaj will supply state-of-the-art production and post-production facilities, media asset management, broadcast and technical support services for use within twofour54. Twofour54 tawasol will provide technical support and facilitate the relocation and establishment of partner organisations in twofour54. Caroline Preudergust, Director of Training and Development at BBC, said as one of the partners working with twofour54, BBC would serve as an integral part of the twofour54 training programme by providing one-on-one training in film-making and production skills. Imagination, which was established by Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC) to create full-length feature films and digital content for the Arab world, will be a founding partner of twofour54, and one of its main initiatives will be the establishment of National Geographic Films producing Arabic programming for the region. Jake Ebert, Chairman of National Geographic Films, said he hoped the movies would capture the uniqueness of Arab culture in its diversity, stressing that the productions will not be modelled after Hollywood productions. – Khaleej Times

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http://www.uaeinteract.com/docs/Abu_Dhabi_plans_new_media_zone/32396.htm

Abu Dhabi's media free zone opens on Sunday

posted on 12/10/2008

A mega media park will be launched today to "create content by Arabs for Arabs," according to a senior executive. "Abu Dhabi has the opportunity of becoming a creative hub for the media as well as arts and culture," Tony Orsten, CEO of the Abu Dhabi Media Park, told Gulf News. He said in five to 10 years, there will be a broad media industry in the UAE capital. "Production companies, editing and content will be made here not because it is cheaper than Cairo or Beirut, but because the quality of the content and the talent is here," said Orsten. A temporary campus for the media park will be set up by the end of this year near Khalifa Park. The actual park of 200,000 square metres will be constructed in five years in Mina Zayed area. The media park will build production studios and post production suites, transmission services (teleport uplink and downlink, satellite service provider, telecommunication and IT services and immigration and relocation services. – Gulf News

http://uaeinteract.com/docs/Abu_Dhabis_media_free_zone_opens_on_Sunday/32372.htm

Abu Dhabi now has its own media zone that competes with Dubai Media City. But is the UAE in need of yet another media hub?
The Abu Dhabi Media Park launched today. The 200,000 square meter project will take over five years to complete, Gulf News reports. It will be temporarily housed closed to Khalifa Park until its larger campus in Mina Zayed is completed around 2014.
But does the UAE really need yet another media park? Aren’t Dubai Studio City, IMPZ and Dubai Media City enough? Apparently not. Abu Dhabi Media Park is quick to highlight its unique selling proposition: speaking to Gulf News, a senior executive at the Abu Dhabi Media Park states that at the media park content will be created “by Arabs for Arabs.”
While it sounds like it will have an exclusion policy, it won’t. In September 2008, the Abu Dhabi Media Company, which will be located in the media park, forged a deal worth $250 million with Participant Media, a Los Angeles based production company behind controversial hits like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Syriana” (which, ironically, was censored in the UAE). The deal is to produce over 15 feature films over a span of five years. More recently, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Media Company, Image-nation Abu Dhabi, signed a deal with National Geographic Entertainment to produce 10 to 15 films by 2014. Clearly, the content created ‘by Arabs for Arabs’ will have significant boosts from non-Arabs.
But it’s easy to be cynical. The truth is without foreign help it’ll take decades before Abu Dhabi’s media scene matures enough to produce good quality documentaries. At least with the presence of established production companies, Arabs will be involved in the production of high-profile movies and documentaries: “We will be doing films on this region using local talent, producers and local writers,” said Tim Kelly, president of National Geographic Global Media (quoted in Gulf News).
Not only do the collaborations allow Arabs to take part, they also give nationals and Arabs a chance to have hands on experience without having to deal with the cutthroat competition other media hopefuls would face in the United States.
Such initiatives have yet to be announced in Dubai’s DMC. Indeed, DMC seems like more of a business park than a breeding ground for local talent and Arab-centric media productions. Dubai, however, doesn’t seem keen on becoming a center of arts and culture. Abu Dhabi does.
It appears the two emirates are vying for difference audiences. And if that’s true, then it begs the question: is the Abu Dhabi Media Park yet another addition to a larger ‘vision’ for the UAE?

http://www.kippreport.com/kipp/2008/10/13/media-wars/

Let me introduce you to the DMC:

THE DUBAI MEDIA CITY

Dubai Media City (DMC) is the only global media hub in the region where all media-related businesses thrive together. Strategically located in Dubai at the crossroads of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, your business can profitably operate in the local and international markets from DMC.
DMC is a successful reflection of the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai to transform Dubai into a knowledge-based society and economy.
In respect to this vision, DMC creates a world-class environment for every kind of media business, which broadly includes media and marketing services, printing and publishing, music, film, new media, leisure and entertainment, broadcasting and information agencies. In this open and flexible environment, you and your company can operate with collective synergy and individual freedom.
Being a dedicated media zone, DMC ensures that all media businesses are given the “Freedom to Create”. That’s why, with advanced infrastructure, support services, freedom of capital movement, tax-free income and easy access to markets rich with untapped opportunities, Dubai and DMC is the ideal location to base your productive media business.In the following pages, you will find all the information you need to assist you in making the prime decision to move to Dubai Media City. If you need further information or would like to schedule a sales meeting please call: DMC Sales on +9714 3914555 or email: sales@dubaimediacity.ae.

THE VISION OF DUBAI TECHNOLOGY & MEDIA FREE ZONE:

To become an efficient and leading provider of servicesto foster the growth of Dubai’s knowledge based economy
THE MISSION OF DUBAI MEDIA CITY:

To create and market world class enabling services for the media industry