Entrepreneurship Media: Brand Journalism and Verticals’ : Practice-Analysis of Six Regional Arab Outlets

Abstract

Over the last decade, new forms of vertical media have officially arisen in the Arab world, beginning from Al-Sham with a regional perspective. Unlike the global context in which Entrepreneurship Media (EM) began decades earlier, this relatively new vertical media was not, until lately, one of the traditional forms of business media in the Arab world. In Egypt, EM was fostered through mass media outputs in the form of TV shows. Through working on both the development and business sides, observing and analyzing content of this emerging trendy EM is becoming increasingly important. With key informant interviews with six leading and outstanding regional entrepreneurship-focused digital and print platforms, practitioners from the media and entrepreneurship ecosystems can understand how this new form of media has emerged and who stands behind it, what purposes it serves, how it has been growing, which business models have proven to be successful, and how EM is being challenged to answer the question of whether there is potential for real journalism in Vertical Media and Brand Journalism. The ground-setting platforms are Wamda, Entrepreneur Middle East & Al-Arabiya, Arabnet, MENAbytes, Founders Media (WAYA) and Startup Scene ME. The paper solely attends to regional platforms that have laid the groundwork for this new media format.