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Nayla Tueni: ‘I am a journalist, a journalist, a journalist’

Nayla Tueni told Frank Kane over lunch that the financial crisis in Lebanon 'taught us that, if we are going to survive, we need to expand' Supplied
Nayla Tueni told Frank Kane over lunch that the financial crisis in Lebanon 'taught us that, if we are going to survive, we need to expand'

Nayla Tueni is as close as you get in the Middle East to media aristocracy.

She is the fourth generation of a family that, for the best part of a century – through wars, assassinations, man-made disasters and economic crises – has kept publishing Annahar, a Lebanese broadsheet described by Time magazine as “the newspaper of record for the entire Arab world”.

Others would probably contest that title, but there is no doubt of the newspaper’s central role in Lebanon since 1933, when it was launched by Tueni’s great-grandfather Gebran, and of its resonance in the rest of the Middle East.

Now, to keep Annahar at the forefront of the regional media scene, Tueni has relaunched the paper.

Offering a full digital product online, and working from newly refurbished premises in the same downtown Beirut offices that were virtually destroyed in the port explosion of 2020, she has grand plans for multi-lingual and international expansion.

We meet over lunch to discuss the rebirth of Annahar in perhaps the quintessential journalist’s restaurant in Dubai – Certo, in the Radisson Blu hotel in Media City.

Many are the burning news stories that have been discussed over pasta and Chianti at this unassuming Italian, and many the expenses claims subsequently filed to the accounts department.

I reminded Tueni of the rules of Lunch with Frank Kane – that the guest can choose any venue and AGBI picks up the bill – which I’m not sure she understood when we first arranged to meet. “Another time in Burj Al Arab,” she suggests.

Soon after we have ordered simple pasta dishes, the conversation turns sombre.

“I am not afraid of dying,” she says, as we discuss the circumstances nearly 20 years ago which thrust her into the leadership chair at Annahar and into the cockpit of Lebanese politics.

In 2005 her father, also named Gebran, who had just returned to Beirut from a stay in Paris due to death threats at home, was assassinated in a car bomb attack while on his journey into the newspaper offices. The involvement of Syria or its allies inside Lebanon was strongly suspected, but nobody has ever been charged with the murder.

Her grandfather, Ghassan – also a former editor – took up his murdered son’s seat, Achrafieh, in the Lebanese parliament, and a few years later Nayla was elected in the same constituency to continue the family political dynasty, which she did for nearly a decade.

It was a challenging time for her, as a young trainee journalist with no managerial or political experience.  

“You’re young, you’re a woman, your father was killed. And you can make changes. But people will be disappointed and say that you didn’t do enough because the system stopped you,” she says.

With that background, does she see herself as a journalist, or as a politician? “Journalist, journalist, journalist,” she insists emphatically.

It has not been an easy couple of decades in Lebanese media, despite the wealth of newsworthy material originating in that crisis-torn country.

Soon after she became editor, the global financial crisis compounded what she calls the “digital crisis” – the shift away from printed products as readers and advertisers began to take their news and opinion online. Annahar, like legacy media groups around the world, suffered a collapse in revenues and readership.

Her father had introduced an online PDF version of the paper, and she enhanced the digital offering further, offering lifestyle, health coverage and women’s features to what had been a heavy, politically driven publication.

“The financial crisis in Lebanon taught us that, if we are going to survive, we need to expand more, and have a presence in the Gulf and other parts of the Arab world,” Tueni says.

From this was born the sister website Annahar Al Arabi, with offices throughout the region and a main office in Dubai Media City.

We will never change our line. We will always be independent, innovative, technology-driven, business oriented and non-sectarian

The port explosion in Beirut in August 2020 was a seminal moment in the development of the new Annahar strategy.

Tueni and the editorial staff were preparing coverage of the expected ruling of a special tribunal investigating the assassination of late prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 – an important and emotion-laden event, given the widespread suspicion that the assassins were the same as those who had killed her father.

Then the shockwave ripped through the building.

“There were 35 casualties in the office, though thankfully nobody was killed. We were just 200 metres away from the explosion, and I don’t know how we survived, when the building was all glass.

“We worked through that day, and got out a four-page newspaper, in black and white, with coverage of the explosion,” she recalls. “The next day people came in to help clear up, and you could still see blood on the floor.”

But the enormous damage from the port blast provided another reason to start afresh at Annahar.

The newly refurbished offices, in the same building devastated in 2020, opened late last year with a state of the art newsroom layout and open plan conferencing designed to streamline decision-taking functions, as well as redesigned and relaunched website apps and two newspaper editions.

The entire process was completed in eight months.

“But it is not a transformation to have a basic renovation. The real transformation is to monetise the product, to bring in money from many places, from subscriptions, advertising, projects, events, training courses. Because if you don’t monetise you will not survive,” she says.

Tueni was advised on this transformation by Innovation Media, a news consultancy experienced in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, whose motto is: “Only journalism can save journalism”, highlighting the need for quality content as a major driver of monetisation.

“This is not any more a newspaper, it is a ‘viewspaper’, to offer something new to readers by way of interpretation. We cannot just carry on telling people what happened yesterday; we need to explain the why, the who and the how,” she says.

That also requires retraining the journalistic mindset, which is a top priority, and also the extensive use of artificial intelligence in daily print and online production. 

One of Tueni’s advisers sums it up: “We are a proper digital-first AI-powered newsroom, using every tool in the box.”

There are plans, too, for an enhanced string of foreign bureaux around the world, and for AI-generated translation into English and French to increase international exposure.

The online site is behind a “soft” paywall, where readers gain access to some content for free, but the premium offering is paid for.

So far, the concept has worked, with big increases in traffic reported in the early stages – admittedly when the attention of the world was drawn to Lebanon as a result of the Israeli incursion into the south and the attacks on Beirut.

The air attacks on Beirut did not derail the relaunch, despite the physical threat to some journalists living in affected parts of the city. 

“We have learned to live and worked with that danger for the past 20 years,” says Tueni.

The redesign and relaunch went ahead while Israeli bombs were falling less than a kilometre away. On the official opening day last year, an Israeli drone hovered over the building. She has the photographs.   

The redesigned weekday print edition will continue as long as Tueni sees demand for it among traditional readers, with a weekend edition offering more in-depth features, analysis and investigations. Daily print is “a bridge, to see where we are going in the future,” she says.

The future, as ever in Lebanon, is unpredictable and prone to the whim of more powerful neighbours.

What will be crucial to the editorial success of the new Annahar is how it picks its way through the minefield of constitution-enshrined sectarianism within the country, and the competing, often hostile influence of outside forces.

Tueni holds a blank edition of Annahar newspaper during a news conference in Beirut in 2018Reuters/Mohamed Azakir
Tueni holds a copy of Annahar in 2018. The first eight pages of this edition were published blank to protest against Lebanon’s political deadlock

Tueni is an Orthodox Christian, and you may expect that her family history prejudices her against Syria and its Shia proxy within Lebanon, Hezbollah. But she is adamant that the new Annahar will be independent and non-sectarian.

Annahar will never change from being the pioneer of freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of the press people, to be the voice of all people.

“We will never change our line from being who we are. We are against any armed group, other than the Lebanese army, and against any interference from any country, any regime,” she says.

“We will always be independent, innovative, technology-driven, business oriented and non-sectarian,” she adds for emphasis.

(Our lunch took place before the election of Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian general in the Lebanese army, as president of the country.)

Coverage of Hezbollah will be “objective”, Tueni insists, pointing to Annahar’s reporting of the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of the military and political group, when the paper reported the fact of his death alongside a call for national unity.

She agrees that Hezbollah has been severely weakened within Lebanon by Israel, but also accepts that the “Party of God” deserves a place within the political process as representative of the Shia minority. 

“They have to accept that there is no reason any more to be an armed party. We are not asking them to disappear, but we are telling them that now is the time to be political. And to be responsible to Lebanon, not taking orders from Iran,” she says.

When I suggest that she should be grateful to Israel for reducing the power of Hezbollah, she snaps back: “We cannot be grateful to Israel for being at war and the feeling we could die any day.”

Nonetheless, she is relatively optimistic that the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel will hold.

Likewise, she is encouraged by the developments inside Syria, with the overthrow of the Assad regime, and the comments of the new leadership in Damascus that it will stay out of Lebanese politics.

She hopes, too, that Iran, the US, France and Arab regional powers will avoid interference – or at least use their influence for good, such as by providing reconstruction aid.

Can I have the bill, please?

On Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, she says: “They love Lebanon. They always say that they want the sovereignty of the country, they want peace in the country, they want reform.”

Then, there are the challenges of the Lebanese economy. For many years, the country has teetered on the brink of disaster, but many Lebanese seem to have found a modus operandi through the economic chaos.

“For so long it’s been collapsing. But it’s a crazy country that you cannot understand. If you go now to Lebanon, they say they have a crisis but all the restaurants are full. People are partying, shopping, everything. At the same time, you have people that cannot eat.”  

Turning round the Lebanese economy, while keeping the country free of foreign interventions, seem incredibly ambitious tasks. I ask Tueni – now a mother of three – whether she may be ready to go back into politics to help achieve them.

“Never, never,” she says categorically, before seeming to regret the finality of that, and deciding: “I don’t know. Now, I don’t feel it.”

After Tueni has left and I am paying the very modest bill, I weigh up the conversation of the past 90 minutes, and conclude that at some stage in the future, this dedicated woman will probably be back on the political scene in Lebanon. 

But she will never cease to be a journalist.