Backed by accurate and insightful content, multiplatform Arabic-language news service Asharq is cementing its reputation in the MENA media landscape.
In November 2022, Asharq, which includes Asharq News, Asharq Business with Bloomberg, and more recently Asharq Discovery, successfully completed two years since its launch. Asharq has witnessed unprecedented growth since its launch, with the network marking several milestones, opening new bureaus across the region and achieving an impressive slew of awards.
A subsidiary of the Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG), the MENA region’s largest media group, Asharq was launched with the mission to “unravel the economic insights behind every headline”, says Nabeel Alkhatib, GM of Asharq News. Driven by this, Asharq has multiple digital channels in addition to a dedicated television channel. A multi-pronged approach has enabled the network to offer continuous insights into events, ideas and people that impact the MENA region and international markets.
“Our approach is based on telling the story to the people wherever they are and however they prefer to consume it. And over the past two years, we have been adamant on elevating our experience as we grow and attend to audience needs,” says Alkhatib. Cases in point are its Moasherat Asharq show, which offers insights into business and politics, and another political talk show, The Washington Report (aired from Washington, DC), which hosts politicians, researchers, academics and journalists to discuss current issues from decision-making centres such as the White House, Congress, the State Department, the Treasury and the Pentagon.
Asharq’s social media followers and website traffic are a testament to its popularity among audiences. The channel boasts a portfolio of 60 accounts across seven social media platforms and nine sub-brands covering news from multiple angles, industries and sectors such as technology, green, business, crypto, sports and opinion articles. The network also boasts three mobile apps: Asharq News, Asharq Business and Asharq NOW. It recently celebrated 30m followers across social platforms, making it the fastest-growing brand in the region and the most viewed, followed and engaging business accounts across social against all competitors. Both Asharq News and Asharq Business place first among their competitors in terms of growth.
Asharq’s digital footprint includes four websites, the newest of which is its sports website, which has a heavy focus on football. “We are very well aware that sports news has a large audience and fan base, and it is increasingly becoming one of the key trending topics across the world, especially amongst the younger generation,” explains Alkhatib. Asharq’s Fil Mondial programme, featuring prominent football stars, players and coaches from the Middle East, such as Egyptian football star Ahmed Hossam ‘Mido’, has raked in millions of viewers too.
The network has been able to create unparalleled and premium quality content thanks to the substantial technological investments it has made. Despite being only in its second year of operation, the network undertook a comprehensive infrastructure improvement drive across all its bureaus spread across different parts of the region including Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Egypt. It introduced the object matrix solution for deep archive storage to improve connectivity among its network bureaus across the Middle East. “With the ability to connect to product asset management (PAM) systems, the object matrix enables Asharq to share and archive content between its storage archive and PAM easily,” explains Omran Abdallah, Director of Engineering and IT at Asharq News.
The network is also investing in the Qibb cloud solution from Qvest. “This is mainly to aid distribution between our different offices across the network and centralise all operations such as content archives, dashboard and transcoding,” says Abdallah.
Another significant development at Asharq has been its partnership with Newsbridge, a cloud-based platform for next-gen media valorisation. “One of the most important things we are doing now is content provisioning and content artificial intelligence. We are using Newsbridge to enrich the database of our content and enable research using speech and face recognition. This will speed up things in the newsroom, enabling the editorial department to research and access the content in our archives quickly,” adds Abdallah.
Going forward, Asharq’s roadmap includes setting up state-of-the-art studios for its different bureaus across the region. The network boasts a brand-new studio in Riyadh which is also set up for remote operation, should the facility need to be controlled from its Dubai HQ. The studio has currently been fitted with a 30m Barco video wall and an additional AV control room that enables Asharq’s Saudi team to go live directly from Riyadh when required. With most facilities designed for multiple purposes, the Saudi operation also serves as a disaster recovery studio and there are bigger plans to expand this facility with state-of-the-art solutions.
Asharq is continuously looking to push the envelope and integrate new and disruptive solutions that ensure scalability, flexibility and reliability. To that effect, it is also now ambitiously moving towards building a new connectivity hub between its various sites, to work on public internet and codex. Given its ambitious expansion plans, its determination to be the best news network across multiple platforms and its technical prowess, Asharq is on an upward trajectory.
