Adham Center News

CNBC Launches Business Program from Adham Center

While global recession and extraordinary political unrest and violence in the region over the past year have somewhat dampened viewer interest in TV financial and business news, that didn't prevent CNBC - the world's leading business and financial news channel - from launching a new weekly program, Middle East Business Report. The Dubai-based producers of the program, Middle East Business News (MEBN) turned to the Adham Center's Post-Graduate Professional Unit for assistance.

Operating from the Adham Center's AVID News Room, the CNBC/MEBN Cairo bureau consisted of video journalist Nermine Alireza (MA 2001), already a veteran correspondent for Nile News, and Adham Center director S. Abdallah Schleifer, who functioned as executive producer/bureau chief for the weekly Cairo segments. Adham Center graduate student (and Nile TV correspondent) Lena El Ghadban took over last spring when Alireza married and moved to Beirut.

Far a little more than a year the Adham Center-based CNBC/MEBN Cairo bureau produced an average of one to two stories a week that included reports on new leadership at the Ministry of Telecommunications, the Egyptian stock market, 9/11's impact on tourism and another impact report on the Egyptian economy. The Cairo bureau also explored whether oil was still a viable weapon for the Arabs, covered the OPEC meeting in Cairo and the Donor's Conference in Sharm al Sheikh, and did an interview with the head of the Palestinian mobile telephone company on how his company was holding up in the face of the Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank.

During this past summer, while the show was off the air, MEBN's CEO Zafir Saddiqi negotiated a new deal with CNBC, with MEBN taking a license from CNBC to transmit from its headquarters in Dubai a new Arabic-language satellite channel CNBC Arabia. Saddiqi predicted the new channel would be operational, with staff correspondents and stringers in all of the major Arab capitals, by March 2003. Saddiqi pledged that CNBC Arabia would be in touch with the Adham Center's Post-Graduate Professional Unit to renew cooperation well before then.

But Adham Center alumni are still working the business beat. Nermine Alireza is now broadcasting for Dubai Business Channel from Beirut and Dalia Ashmawi (MA 2002), former Student Executive Producer in the second year graduate workshop and winner of the Kamal Adham Award for Outstanding Performance in June 2002, is now Cairo correspondent for the Dubai Business Channel. Indeed, the Adham Center's association with TV business and financial news began with the Dubai Business Channel, when the Center's director was commissioned by DBC to come to Dubai in June 2001 and run an intensive one-week training course in field reporting for DBC's reporters and producers.

THE EDITORS