Typewriters and pencils How it was working for the newspaper in the late 1980s and early 1990s
I started working for Arab News in Jeddah in June 1988, 13 years after it was launched.
The newspaper, which at that time had no other offices, was published from a three-story building, in the quaint neighborhood of Al-Faisaliya, that was flanked by Square Bridge and Al-Fao supermarket. The paper’s slogan was “The Middle East’s Leading English Language Daily.” The Arab News logo atop the front page was written in lower case letters in an arabesque style.
I worked as an editor and editorial writer. One editorial was published each day, seven days a week.
At the time I was the only Egyptian working for Arab News. The rest of the staff were mainly Indian and Pakistani. Perhaps this explains why the newspaper’s target readership was mainly the large expatriate communities from the sub-continent, along with Filipinos.
When I started, the staff was all-male. Four women, all Saudis, joined a few years later. Their physical presence on the premises was a new and bold step, because up until then the only women in the Saudi workforce were teachers or medical staff in hospitals.
Those first women employed by Arab News were all editors, and they worked in a small room set aside for them.
I worked under three different editors-in-chief, each of whom brought a different approach to the post. Khaled Almaeena focused on promoting the newspaper, Farouk Luqman was the paper’s engine room, while Abdul Qader Tash had to play catch-up because he previously worked on Arabic-language publications. We addressed them as Mr. or Ustaz or Dr., followed by their first name.
One of my colleagues at Arab News was Jamal Khashoggi. I didn’t know him well but he was big in physique and heart, an affable character and very down to earth.
Arab News was part of what was then called the Saudi Research and Marketing Company. The founders and owners of the publishing business, brothers Hisham and Mohammed Hafiz, humble as they were, would pray with the staff, usually at Maghreb times.
Arab News had two main rival publications in the Kingdom: The Saudi Gazette and the Riyadh Daily. The former was a formidable publication that kept us on our toes as we competed with it. The latter ceased publication in 2004.
When I started working for Arab News, there were no computers, internet, or mobile phones in the office. Reporters wrote their stories on typewriters. Sub-editors edited ticker stories, mostly from Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
Sub-editors used pencils and rulers to draw pages on dummies that were six columns wide and 32 cm deep. We would manually count the number of lines, and sometimes words, in a story to try to ensure that it was neither too long nor too short for the space it had to fill.
The copy was then given to the proofreaders who crowded around a long, rectangular table in the basement on which sat piles of paper. To speed things up, we would send the stories to the basement in tube chutes. One night the stories got stuck in the tube, holding up the newspaper’s midnight deadline.
After proofreading, the stories were printed on strips of bromide that were pasted by the layout staff onto newspaper-sized dummies, ready for the printing process. In the early 1990s there was a sea change in journalism: The advent of the computer in the office. Experts from the Kingdom and other countries were brought in to show us how to use the new contraptions, but it was a slog for many of us. We had to throw away our pens and paper, set aside many of our hard-earned manual-editing skills and learn what was essentially a new way to work.
There was one brief odd spell during my time with Arab News, during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Saddam Hussein had captured Kuwait in a matter of hours and was marshaling thousands of troops on the Saudi border. But for at least the first 10 days we could not publish a word about what was happening because we were barred from criticizing other Arab countries. We never had a fashion page in those days and could never even dream of having one. When we published a photo of a woman wearing, for example, a blouse, we had to use photo-editing software to cover her arms down to her wrists. The same technique was applied to plunging necklines and skirts deemed too short.
When I left Arab News and Jeddah in 1997, I continued writing editorials for the newspaper from Cairo but it was never quite the same as actually being there in the office.
Alaa Abdel-Ghani is former deputy editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Englishlanguage newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and an affiliate professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo.