Faculty of Mass Communication and Fine Arts at Al Maaref University participated in a Zoom Webinar on ‘The Future of News Industry Post Covid-19 Pandemic’ organized by the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) on April 28.

Head of the Department of Journalism and Digital Media at MU, Dr. Hatem El Zein, presented a paper entitled “Lessons Learned and Development Opportunities for Arab Media Institutions Post Covid-19 Pandemic”.

In his intervention, El Zein referred to the fallouts experienced by the Arab media, especially traditional ones, during the Covid 19 era, pointing to the general conditions and contexts that the Arab media is going through and its inability to achieve a sound and effective digital transformation for a number of reasons.

Emphasizing the need for coordination between academic institutions graduating media professionals and media institutions, El Zein explained that media lessons learned from the Covid-19 crisis can be summarized in four aspects: professional sobriety and enhancing media ethics, the need for reliable academic and research references, digital investing, and the importance of promoting occupational solidarity and improving working conditions and environment in media organizations.

Development opportunities available to Arab media must be on four levels, El Zein pointed out, explaining that the first should be at the societal level, the second at the content level, the third at the level of external opportunities utilizing, and the fourth at the level of digitization and the associated transformations.

“There is an urgent need for a platform gathering well-known experts to serve as an official Arab media reference which has a role in scrutinizing news and spotting false ones after what Arab media has suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said, considering that digitizing the Arab community appears as a need and an access point in the process of humanized digital transformation, which constitutes an umbrella for contemporary Arab digital media which as a result can emulate and keep pace with successful and effective coverage.

It’s worth noting that Dr. Mohamed Chettah, the Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication & Media and Director, Communication & Media program in Al Ain University, United Arab Emirates, has participated in the webinar and presented on “Variables in the Contents and Forms of Media Production Post Covid-19”. For her part, Liz Corbin, Deputy Director Media and Head of News at the European Broadcasting Union, also had an intervention titled “Future Media Strategies in Interaction with Streaming Patterns and News Consumption on Digital Platforms.”