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26 based publisher Nervora; and John Defterios, CNN Business Emerging Markets Editor and anchor of ‘CNN Marketplace Middle East’, CNN International. For Ms Al-Oraibi, Editor-in-Chief of The National, the news media may have changed as a result of technology but so too have reader expectations. “Today, publications can no longer rely on the written word,” she said. “In some ways this has allowed us to expand beyond a traditional newspaper and has made us more exciting. The paper never goes to bed, it’s constantly updated; if the reader believes that The National is not going to be the most up-to-date news outlet they will go elsewhere.” For Mr Menon, the publisher of Vogue Arabia, Wired Middle East and PopSugar Middle East, the impact of new technologies on publishing has actually been counter-intuitive. From his background in digital technology and media, in which he used to predict the demise of print, Mr Menon now considers himself to be a convert, not just to print media, but to the traditional values associated with it. “What’s still most important is to produce something that matters and that people care about. Even though technology has changed the medium and the visualisation of it, if you don’t produce something that people care about, you don’t exist, and that’s been true forever,” he said. “Technology is a great tool but it doesn’t solve the root problem of producing something that is meaningful. Where a lot of companies have gone wrong is looking at technology just as a platform for scale and for scale’s sake, which I think is a fool’s errand.” For both Mr Menon and Mr Defterios of CNN, a news landscape that generates 350,000 tweets a second and an environment of information overload make the curation of news even more important. “Our viewers and readers want reliability. There’s a danger in the market today of an echo chamber where people of \[diverse\] political persuasions go into their own echo chambers, and that goes into a feedback loop and becomes reality,” said Mr Defterios.