Sideig Elzein (pictured), Assistant Manager of Marketing and Communication at Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), recently received a PhD from Sudan University of Science and Technology, College of Communications Science. His research, titled ‘Trends of Shape and Content in Contemporary Economic Journalism’ was based on an analytical study comparing Arab economic journalism with the same elsewhere.
The research found that 65 percent of readers depend on economic journalism in hard copy to obtain information but 81 percent of them don’t trust it for decision making. Absence of transparency, lack of specialized journalists and weak content are the main drawbacks of Arab economic journalism.
The research was an endeavour to find out the state of economic journalism in the Arab world and to identify its interest in economic issues, journalistic techniques it uses, its sources of information, trends in readers taste, its communication channels, the role of modern communication technology in its circulation in order to reveal its aliments and strengths and to see to what extent it was guided by foreign Economic Journalism.
The research recommended a package of procedures that called on more focus on journalistic techniques such as editorials, reports and reportages which are suitable journalistic techniques for economic issues. It also called on to reduce space for advertisements on the front page.
The Peninsula
