15 years of change: The National grows from print-first to multi-platform organisation

The Abu Dhabi newspaper has transformed since its launch in 2008 as a daily newspaper with a bolt-on website

The National's new printing press produces the first prototype newspaper on April 9, 2008, about a week after the first official edition was produced and distributed. Ryan Carter / The National

On the eve of The National’s launch in April 2008, Colin Randall, the paper’s then executive editor, wrote on his blog that he found himself at a late stage of his career “to be participating for the first time in the thrill of launching a national newspaper”.

If truth be told, he added, “it is also a late stage in the career of newspapers themselves”, referencing the structural changes that were already under way in the global news industry, both in terms of how information was delivered and where audiences found it.

In the 15 years since Randall wrote those words, The National has transformed from being a daily newspaper with a bolt-on website in 2008 into a news organisation publishing multi-format stories across a range of platforms.

In those early days of The National, newsgathering and production would be completed for print each evening and then a separate team of journalists would put those same stories on our website over the next few hours.

While the print-first arrangements of a decade and a half ago may seem unusual to contemporary observers – who are now used to breaking news alerts punctuating their day on multiple devices – they were, for better or worse, built for the times we lived in. The iPhone was only a year or so old in 2008 and social media was still finding its way into a central place in so many of our lives.

Content management systems, the unseen engines that drive the rapid dissemination of information today, were yet to become the swift editorial systems they are now.

And newspapers, while already experiencing the anxieties of a world where consumers could read a more up-to-date version of a story online for nothing instead of paying for it in print, remained a central part of many people’s news diets.

Nowadays, a cohort of staff at The National are still busy with the work of putting together a newspaper each evening, while our network of journalists in the UAE and around the world write, file, edit and publish stories throughout the day and night. The print deadline is late in the evening Abu Dhabi time. Our online deadlines never stop.

So how does one articulate the breadth of change the organisation has undertaken in the past decade and a half?

One place to try might be in the newsroom itself, which moved in 2017 from its old location on Mohammed bin Khalifa Street in the centre of Abu Dhabi island to its current home in offices overlooking Khalifa Park.

To get to the old location in 2008, new arrivals in the city were instructed to tell drivers of the old white-and-gold taxis to ask for “Jareeda Ittihad” and hope the cab would find its way to the correct place. The first Google Maps-equipped Android phone would be released later that year and the days of driving round and round in circles looking for your destination would soon draw to a close.

The crosstown move six years ago to Khalifa Park, along with a simultaneous change in ownership and newsroom leadership, ushered in a period of rapid organisational transformation.

Techniques and processes were overhauled to relaunch the operation. Revision and refinement became the lights by which to navigate.

And then, three years ago, when the pandemic dispersed The National’s staff to individual home newsrooms dotted across the country and around the globe, adaptation and resourcefulness became our temporary guiding principles, before staff members began to gradually return to the office as Covid-19 prevention measures eased.

Tellingly, if 15 years ago the online department was viewed as an adjunct operation in the original newsroom, now our digital operations are at the centre of every moment of the working day.

The traditional structures of a newsroom organised to produce a newspaper are still there, of course – the newsdesk, the desks for foreign, comment, business and so on – but these days, the dynamics of reader engagement and audience analytics are absolutely at the centre of it all. TV screens dotted around the newsroom offer real-time snapshots of which of our stories have connected with our readers at any given moment in the day or night.

Newer departments of homepage editors, social media journalists, breaking news reporters and more have sharpened the traditional operations, so too the digital newsgathering tools that are now at our disposal in the newsroom.

The newspaper, once the easiest way to describe the work we undertook each day, is now one product in the organisation’s growing range of offerings.

The central task remains the same as it did in 2008, however.

The National is here to report on and from an increasingly complex region and to tell the story of the UAE and its many communities.

The wider world is also changing fast. Our aim is to keep you on top of all the major developments.

About the only other thing that hasn’t changed in the past 15 years is the price of a print edition. If you prefer reading a newspaper, you’ll still pay Dh3 at the newsstand for a copy of the print edition – the same as you did 15 years ago.