Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper cuts jobs in restructuring
Abu Dhabi's The National laid off 28 journalists Thursday, a spokesperson confirmed, amid a restructuring of the English-language publication.
The cuts included employees on the multimedia, digital, and foreign desks, the people said. Editor-in-chief Mina Al-Oraibi delivered the news during a company-wide meeting but did not elaborate on the reason for the layoffs. One person said the cuts were part of a broader restructuring at parent company International Media Investments (IMI), which is owned by UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Al-Oraibi declined to comment.
The National was first published in 2008, and since then has gone through several iterations as the leading English-language news source in the UAE, and employed dozens of journalists who went on to work elsewhere (including the authors of this article).
IMI acquired The National from state-backed firm Abu Dhabi Media in 2016. The company also owns Sky News Arabia, CNN Business Arabic, and a minority stake in Euronews.
Since then The National, like every print publication, has followed a bumpy road into digital media. Al-Oraibi described the publication at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week as 'a legacy newspaper that's very quickly become an online platform,' and cited growing podcast and newsletter businesses.
'I'm really optimistic because we're building communities,' she said. 'At The National we have 300,000 subscribers of our newsletters. There's no way you'd be able to sell 300,000 newspapers in the population of 10 million in the UAE.'
Since 2008, The National aimed to be the Middle East's most influential English-language newspaper. It hired editors and reporters from top publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph for its launch and served as a springboard for journalists who went on to major careers, including Project Brazen co-founder Bradley Hope, WSJ's Keach Hagey, The New Yorker contributor Rania Abouzeid, me, and my colleague Kelsey Warner, who covered business and tech during her five-year stint.
As for me, I only worked there for eight weeks, two of them before the paper went live. It was the summer of 2008, and the dominant story was the mounting debt weighing down Dubai Inc. When it became clear that we needed to tiptoe around it, I left.
The limitations were a result of the country's media laws and, perhaps, some self-censorship. But the publication remains a must-read and attracts a sizable audience. Its stories provide an important service to readers in the UAE and beyond, and indeed its reporting appears frequently in Semafor newsletters.
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