By Thomas Schellen – Make no mistake about it, it is not a new idea that media types are today’s variant of preachers. Whether
they work in advertising or in news media, the profession features a
whole gamut of prophets, proselytizers and missionaries. The message
about this land according to Amos (the prophet, not the communications
satellites) was that its previous inhabitants were “as tall as cedars
and as strong as oaks,” promising inbound migrants a fruitful
environment (after overcoming various obstacles). Given the Middle East’s known propensity
for starting religions – just think of the “land of milk and honey” that
a bunch of tribal nomads were promised millennia ago – it cannot come
as a surprise that even within the battered Lebanese economy, the media
crisis of spring 2016 caused an uproar of concern. Several newspaper
companies announced that they were running out of money and were
threatened in their survival.

According to reports, the organizations
faced with closure or forced to downsize were the venerable An-Nahar and
As-Safir newspapers as well as the Al-Akhbar and Future media
organizations. Unconfirmed numbers from the Syndicate of Lebanese
Journalists later said that of the 2,600 journalists with membership in
the organization, 70 percent were already affected by media closures or
at risk to be so in the near term.  The crisis was exacerbated by the broad
failures of media owners to exhibit concerns for their journalists and
employees – omitting what AA President Georges Jabbour called a “CSR
spirit” (see interview) – and by ham-fisted publisher appeals of the give-us-money-or-death variety. 

The 2016 media crisis occupied the minds
of professionals and people interested in the sector throughout 2016, as
was shown in November during a media conference when a panel was tasked
with discussing if the death or the rebirth of print media was in the
Lebanese future. Putting the topic on agenda was
beneficial to move the discussion to open ground and compare the
situation in the Lebanese media with that of foreign print media
markets, especially the UK and France, according to Bachir Khoury, the
Lebanese journalist who moderated the panel. (The two markets were
represented on the panel through an editor of Le Figaro and a former
Middle East correspondent of The Guardian.)

“I don’t know if the panel brought a lot
[in terms of results], but at least the issue was raised publicly. This
is important in Lebanon, where it is somewhat taboo to talk about media
and their financial difficulties. Media here are very polarized in
political and confessional terms and this leads to a situation where
[media employees] talk about financial issues only in secret, because
they don’t want to hurt the image of their leader,” Khoury told
Executive.

This code of silence according to Khoury
is adhered to even by media employees who have not received salaries for
months or years and are not able to provide for their families. “I
liked that panelist Nayla Tueni [the publisher of An-Nahar] said that
the paper’s people have not been paid for a year. My personal point of
view on this is that the Lebanese media is facing a lot of changes, like
in other countries where media have to deal with limitations. But in
Lebanon people are still reading newspapers and the problem is more a
[demise] of political sponsorship,” he said. 

The lack of local newspapers’ financial
means, in Khoury’s view, has some similarities with cases of
cash-strapped media elsewhere, but in the case of Lebanon the lack of
funds is due to known people who stopped paying for media operations
under their wing.

Data on real circulation of different
categories in print media – dailies as well as magazines – was sought by
Executive but was not available when going to press for 2016 and also
questionable in terms of general accuracy.

Zulficar Kobeissi, print media veteran
and chairman of Business Journal, which publishes three magazines from
Beirut (the Alam Al-Massaref banking magazine, the Al-Khaleej magazine
for the Gulf region, and the partly bi-lingual English and Arabic
Business Journal magazine) estimates that the daily circulation of all
Arabic-language newspapers in Lebanon is as low as 50,000 copies, with
return rates of 20 to 30 percent. This means that only about 30,000
daily copies would be absorbed by paying readers.

Kobeissi confirms the entanglements of
Lebanese media with various funders and compares local newspapers with
diabetics who depend on insulin. “Perhaps one paper or the other today
is still getting ‘insulin’ from time to time, but until when? Whether
subsidies from Saudi Arabia or the Gulf are based on conviction or
blackmail – there are both cases – they are reducing payments by 60 or
70 percent; I have inside information that newspapers face this large a
reduction so if a paper got one million dollar[s] per year, they are now
down to $300,000 – that is why they get rid of employees and have
financial troubles,” he told Executive.

Having worked in banking and journalism
his whole life, Kobeissi says he could list 50 reasons why Lebanese
media have trouble – practically one reason for every year he has been
in the profession, and moreover all homegrown problems that have existed
since before the days of the internet.

The root of the problem

He rattles off reasons that include
overspending by media owners; too much jealousy and personal pride in
paper ownership; overly high street prices for newspapers when compared
with people’s purchasing power; failure to rationalize production
processes; incompetence of owners who are neither media managers nor
journalists; lack of personal impact and relevancy of newspaper stories
to readers; inaccuracy, lack of journalistic quality and lack of ethics
in newspapers; and general failure to separate publisher positions and
editor-in-chief positions.

He is able to maintain his operation
based on working on strict budgetary discipline and filling the shoes of
editor-in-chief and media manager instead of bringing in paid people,
but he is not cheerful about the outlook for print media. “The
situation, as it is today, looks as if this business in dying. It is not
easy to make dailies survive, because they face a very difficult
situation with the economy, journalistically, financially, and in terms
of competition. I don’t see that there would be enough light at the end
of the tunnel,” Kobeissi says.

But it seems warranted to also look at
the Lebanese media crisis in the context of the global business models
that have sustained media – from newspapers over audiovisual channels to
online and social media today – for nearly two centuries. This model,
according to Columbia University Professor and writer Tim Wu, is based
on attention arbitration and the principal actors in it are “attention
merchants”.

In a nutshell, the business model of the
attention merchant is to provide something of lesser value and harvest
something in return that can be sold with a profit to someone who
recognizes its potential. In terms of trade offs it is the same as
giving inexpensive glass beads to tribes in an isolated realm in
exchange for metals or ivory that fetch a much higher price in the
developed world. In practical terms, the attention merchant offers goods
like content (low or high in quality and cost of production), fame,
appreciation, or a sense of pride – of belonging, in the case of
propaganda – in exchange for attention or, if heightened, loyalty to an
idea, state or brand.

Media and the advertising industry have
often been in collusion in endeavors to harvest attention and exploit
it, often, even without any awareness of their prey. People, according
to Wu, give up privacy, data and personal attention without getting much
value in return. For Wu, who authored a book that was published under
the title “The Attention Merchants” in 2016, the practice of attention
arbitrage by media and advertising industry represented a long, dark
night in which people’s very awareness was bought cheap and sold at a
markup.

This process unfolded in stages that
involved technological tools from print media – over radio, television,
home computers, portable digital devices to smartphones – and in the
future other wearable devices. It was overall, undeterred, although the
process saw the pendulum swing between excesses in attention
exploitation, using junk as bait, and the emphasizing of privacy and
content quality. Because the process is continuing with new tools and is
a growing challenge, Wu recommends, “If we desire a future that avoids
the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the
consumer and the celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the
preciousness of our attention…”

Within the struggle of Lebanese media to
clean out their own blind spots in areas of corruption and dependence on
political ‘sponsors,’ with the only perceived alternatives in
co-dependence of content media and advertising, it seems high time to be
honest about their chosen art. They must engineer and test new business
models that cover the whole lifecycle of media, and of preaching truth
as best as perceived.