The Gulf needs a Foreign Correspondents’ Club

A young Omani entrepreneur popped up on my LinkedIn feed this week with what struck me as one of the better business ideas to emerge from the Iran war.

He is marketing his coffee shop on the Musandam peninsula, perched above the Strait of Hormuz, as a place to look out over the water at tankers nervously making their way through the world’s most closely watched shipping lane.

“He’ll make a lot of money from global media,” I commented. “I wonder if it’s licensed.”

The post attracted a flurry of comments and reposts, suggesting I was not alone in appreciating the commercial possibilities. The café, La Tasty at Qida, certainly has location on its side. If the Hormuz crisis drags on, international television crews and visiting correspondents could probably keep the place going by themselves.

But it also got me thinking: where do Dubai’s journalists go?

There are plenty of bars, obviously. The hotels around Media City contain several that have served as unofficial watering holes over the years. The Icon at the Radisson Blu was one, although it is currently being refurbished.

Around DIFC there are a couple of places where you might occasionally bump into a Bloomberg journalist nursing a drink after the markets close. But there is nowhere you can walk into, reasonably confident that somebody from the trade will be there.

It was very different in London in the heyday of Fleet Street. Back then, journalists had an extraordinary variety of establishments in which to conduct what might generously be described as the “informal” part of the working day.

The Tipperary, the Old Bell, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and El Vino were among the great institutions. You could walk into any of them and find colleagues from rival newspapers, news agencies and magazines. For an hour or two, the ferocious competition of Fleet Street was suspended.

The Financial Times had its own special institution, the Sea Horse, tucked around the back of Bracken House. I spent many hours there, in the garrulous company of FT journalists, sub-editors and printers.

It had another clientele too. In the days when newspapers actually had editions, the first FT of the evening would come hot off the presses and find its way rapidly into the Sea Horse. City traders would gather there to see what was on the market-moving front page before anybody else did.

In an age of Bloomberg terminals, smartphones and instant financial news, the idea of traders rushing to a pub to inspect a freshly printed newspaper sounds almost prehistoric.

The Sea Horse, incidentally, survives. It is still in Queen Victoria Street, virtually opposite Bracken House, although its website now promotes live sport, darts and late-night opening rather than privileged access to the FT early edition.

There was a serious function behind all this conviviality.

Journalists met other journalists. Information was exchanged, gossip assessed, contacts introduced and stories sometimes born. Reporters who spent their working lives trying to beat one another still belonged to the same rather peculiar profession.

Further reading:

• Dubai goes on media counter-offensive⁠⁠​
• PR, power and the press: a Gulf perspective⁠⁠​
• Message from Saudi Arabia: good journalism is good business⁠⁠

Other great media cities institutionalised the idea. Hong Kong has its famous Foreign Correspondents’ Club, as do several other Asian capitals. They provide somewhere for visiting correspondents and resident journalists to meet, hear speakers, compare notes and complain about editors.

Dubai has nothing comparable.

The city has become one of the most important media centres between Europe and Asia. Reuters, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, the FT and a host of regional and international organisations have journalists here.

Wars, oil shocks, financial crises and the extraordinary growth of the Gulf have made Dubai an increasingly important base for covering a large part of the world. But there is nowhere hacks can call their own.

Local geography is partly responsible. Fleet Street worked because everybody was within walking distance of everybody else. Dubai’s media community is scattered between Media City, DIFC, Downtown and assorted bureaux and home offices.

Technology has played a part too: WhatsApp groups have replaced some of the gossip once exchanged across a bar.

But something has been lost. Dubai has hundreds of places where journalists can arrange to meet. It does not have somewhere journalists simply go because they know somebody like-minded will already be there.

Perhaps what we need is a Gulf Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Though probably at a more convenient location than Musandam.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist