MediaZone

From The New York Times:

On Sunday, a spate of companies announced that they were setting up shop in Abu Dhabi, an island city that is the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The companies are CNN, the book publishers HarperCollins and Random House, the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Financial Times and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity arm of the financial news giant Thomson Reuters.

Officials from these companies joined local officials in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to announce they would take space on a new 200,000-square-meter campus, called the Abu Dhabi Media Zone, that the government is building for foreign media companies.

This is the third major investment in media undertaken by Abu Dhabi recently. Another arm of the government, the Abu Dhabi Media Company, last year agreed to a $1 billion deal to make video games and movies with Warner Brothers, the Hollywood studio owned by Time Warner. More recently, the company announced it would spend $1 billion to start a film financing offshoot that will invest in Hollywood-style movies for English-speaking audiences.

For CNN the move amounts to a significant investment in the region — a big step beyond its announcement last year that it would expand its international news gathering and add a correspondent in Abu Dhabi. CNN plans to move close to 30 staff members to the city and begin broadcasting a daily prime-time news show from Abu Dhabi on CNN International. Abu Dhabi becomes the fourth international outpost for CNN in which it can produce studio broadcasts, the others being London, Hong Kong and Mexico City.

“News organizations, for a variety of reasons, have been cutting back,” said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide. “We think it’s critical to invest. This is a pretty sizable investment for us.”

Monday, October 13, 2008