My visit to CNN and GeoTV @ Dubai, U.A.E. Part 1

Last week a friend of mine, an old family friend, landed here in Dubai, Emirates. His name, Aamer Mansoor Trambu, a final year student of journalism, Mumbai, India (presently in Ryerson Uni, Toronto, Canada as an exchange student). We had our friendly exchange of life stories and usual recording of random video clips for our own music video (he wanted to showoff what he learned at the school of journalism and I wanted to showoff my Adobe After Effects skills). By the end of the day, suddenly, we decided to do something I had always wanted to for a long time. Visit random companies and pester them with a million questions about their work (and ofcourse learn at the same time, while keeping their irritation at a minimum). So we decided to head to CNN at Dubai Media City.

Now before I talk about the visit, I want to get something off my chest. Generally students, as far as I know in my college, think its not possible to get companies to show them around. This might be because our college professors never encourage us nor tell us how to go about requesting companies to do that and, sharing the blame, the students themselves are never interested. Very few students have tried it (successfully, but never shared their experiences, I don't understand why) and very few professors have told us to do so (these few professors are the reason I am still interested in engineering. For sure, if you try it the right way, companies would love to show you around as long as you truthfully tell them why you are there.

Moving on; I called 119 (Information services) and asked for CNN contact number. They didn’t have CNN listed, weird. Anyway, I know every infrastructure group building has a website, like  

Media City (News, TV, Publishing, Magazines, Events management companies), 

Internet City (Software, CorporateSolutions, TelephoneOp, ISP companies),  

Knowledge Village (Institutes, Training, Colleges, and other companies) and  

Academic City, Silicon Oasis, DubioTech and so on.

We got CNN’s number and Aamir called them up. The operator directly transfered the call to a sweet lady, Miss Samia (Initially she got confused and asked if we wanted to drop in our CV.). Samia asked us to meet the next day (14th Nov) at 12 pm. Wow, we could not believe it. CNN is just a call away!

The next morning I was in college for an hour to do our MATLAB assignments for which I would make a point to attend. Unfortunately, sitting for long in the computer lab caused a wild flareup of my hip joint (ankylosynig spondilitius) and took 20 min to just get down the lift which was about a few meters away. Fortunately the randomness of the flareup helped me this time when the pain reduced considerably on the way back home (talk about randomness). We reached home, got ready and took a taxi to Dubai Media City which’s (yea which’s is a new word) pretty near my house. We reached at 12:30, Late! It did not feel good even though we called at 12:00 and told her we would be late.

We reached and entered the nice building which had restaurants and coffee shops, took the lift to their floor. Everything was in place as it is in an office building, meaning we found our way to CNN without any problems. There was a guard sitting at the front desk, we asked for Miss Samia and he told us to wait. She came in a min later, asked if we would like to have something and took us to the main … hall, that was it, CNN middle east was just a hall with two rows of tables; a Senior editor (in a room), editors, maybe a few technicians and a journalist! This amazed us at first, we thought CNN, a huge brand of Time Warner, to be a whole floor of the building, but it was just a hall. She made it clear to us why. Technology and need. CNN’s parent company is in Atlanta, USA. CNN Dubai is for arabic.cnn.com and they basically write articles/reports in Arabic for the ME region from this office. Online videos on the Arabic website is edited, post-processed and translated here itself. Video footage/feeds come from all over the world to them, and again, technology has made it easier. All communications between various globally situated offices is done through the internet. They do not need an office here to broadcast their streams in the middle east. It's all done from UK for CNN International, Hong Kong for Asia Pacific and South-East Asia.

We asked about their role as journalists while getting news from ME, and said most of it comes from their own CNN sources or through AP, AFP, Routers etc and each story has to be conformed by at least 2 sources before they publish it. If they need to cover something important or live, they can rent a news van, hire a freelance journalist/cameraman/sound engineer and so on. At that time she was working on a story. We ended the meeting by asking about internships. The most basic requirement is knowing Arabic and English and writing in both the languages. Having skills related to media management (video editing, photography, handling cameras, basic networking etc) is a plus. One thing I forgot to ask was where did they get the awesome CNN carpet? A Persian blue with huge CNNI (CNN International) logo all over it The whole meeting lasted for about 20 to 25 mins.

This is the end of Part 1. Coming next is something fun we did after visiting CNN; we visited GeoTV Pakistan without giving any heads up to them.