MEED ditches weekly in favour of digital

Dubai-based business publi

cation Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) has abandoned its weekly journal in favour of a monthly magazine and digital-first approach.

The subscription- based title, which has operated in the Middle East for 58 years, relaunched its weekly intelligence digest as the monthly MEED Business Review, which will focus on in-depth analytical pieces.

The weekly magazine’s con- tent will be published entirely on MEED’s website and app, for which a subscription – including the magzine – costs $1,495 annually.

“Over the past decade or more, we have been increasingly focused on the digital element of subscription, so the website and more recently the app and more engaging things like webinars,” says MEED’s editorial director, Richard Thompson.

“In the digital era, doing a weekly magazine just doesn’t make sense. It prints in the United Kingdom; it takes five days to get out into the market and in some places like Kuwait or Oman it can take two weeks, and sometimes it doesn’t turn up at all. So the actual value of a weekly magazine has been losing currency for a long time.

“Our objective is to get people using MEED every day as part of their business habits. In an environment where you are doing that, there is no role for a weekly print magazine. And because we wanted to do something different with the magazine, we launched MEED Business Review – which is effectively a new product. It’s partly a wrap-up of what’s happened in the past month but it’s primarily aimed at planners and leadership, and looking at forward-thinking pieces and the analysis of trends.”