Established in 1957, MEED has evolved with the region, while remaining true to its founding mission
MEED celebrates its 69th birthday early next month – a journey characterised by huge transformations and upheavals in the region, but with one constant that MEED has lived by from day one: the goal of helping the world understand what is happening in the Middle East and how to benefit from it.
MEED set out all those years ago to offer the business community and government analysts vital information on economic development and commercial opportunities in the region. While the medium might have changed, morphing from newsletter to newsstand to online, MEED has not deviated from this original, unwavering mission.
In its early days, MEED was the only comprehensive source of information on the Middle East. Now it is the region’s leading subscription-based online business intelligence service, offering – as it has done done for decades – the latest business news, interspersed with political updates, comment and analysis.
From newsletter to newstand
The first issue of Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) was published on 8 March 1957 as a hand-printed newsletter in the wake of the Suez invasion.
Former editor the late Abdullah Jonathan Wallace – son of MEED’s founder, Elizabeth Collard (pictured, right) – remembers first working at MEED when he was 15 years old. He would come home from school on Thursday evenings to his mother’s Dickensian office in the then highly unfashionable Covent Garden area of London.
“My job was to fill the 100-or-so envelopes of the subscribers and take them to the post office. Many people would pass by on press day to help collate and staple the newsletter,” he recalled.
Collard, a feisty champion of Arab causes and the driving force behind MEED for its first two decades, had the foresight to realise the potential the Middle East offered to Western business.
A noted economic analyst on the developing world, Collard produced MEED from her one-roomed office on a hand-cranked Ronco printing machine, with the help of two part-time secretaries.
It is no coincidence that the first edition coincided with International Women’s Day, a fitting occasion for a remarkable woman who, by the late 1960s, was brought in to advise Prime Minister Harold Wilson on Middle East affairs.
Among the friends and relatives who helped staple and stuff envelopes with the 12-page newletter was Essa Saleh al-Gurg, later to become the UAE’s ambassador to the UK, who was then training as a banker in London.
Lacking any editorial resources, the Middle East Economic Digest was exactly what it said it was: a compilation from newspapers and other reports. Newspapers were flown in weekly from Cairo and Beirut, then translated and condensed. By June 1965, there were still only three staff members.
“Until the oil boom of the early 1970s, when MEED really took off, we were just about making ends meet,” said Wallace. “We could not afford to hire seasoned journalists or experienced commentators and mostly took British graduates straight from university.
“This changed a little when oil peaked around the end of 1979 at $37.42 a barrel ($111 at today’s prices), but we still preferred to take on graduates and train them on the job due to our high requirement for balanced reporting and tight, accurate writing, which also needed to be finely nuanced to avoid censorship in some countries.
“In business terms, the economies of Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey dominated the interest of Western exporters in the 1960s, together with the cosmopolitan and stylish Beirut as an entrepot and banking centre.
“The oil-producing states of the GCC hardly registered on the Western business radar when I visited Dubai in 1968. The British had a firm hold on the Trucial States and infrastructure projects were undertaken by UK firms.”
The big issues covered in Wallace’s early years at MEED included the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli conflicts, and the Camp David peace accords in 1978; Nasser’s death in 1970; the Lebanese civil war and the invasion of Lebanon by Syria; the 1980-89 Iran-Iraq War; and the assassinations of King Faisal Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia in 1975 and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Oil boom
By the mid-1970s, MEED had become the MEED Group and was in the enviable position of receiving half of its revenue in advance from subscriptions. The other half came from advertising. Rising income streams let to expansion, including the launch of the African Economic Digest and the largest photographic library in the Middle East. A conference division was also started, which broke new ground, holding the Gulf’s first banking conference in Bahrain in the late 1970s.
“Increased revenue meant we could send our reporters to the region on a regular basis, open a bureau in Dubai and then Paris and Washington, and upgrade our typesetting and production equipment to allow us to print on faster, more sophisticated printing machines,” said Wallace.
Since its launch in 1957, MEED has been tackling news issues head-on with groundbreaking exclusives that shape the Middle East
By mid-1986, when it was acquired by Emap, MEED had far outgrown its early role of monitoring published news reports. It had a staff of 20 full-time journalists and 12 researchers and newsroom assistants, with more than 30 correspondents overseas, mostly in the Middle East itself.
The newsletter of the early days became a weekly magazine, and then, as the face of media changed, transformed into a subscription-based online business intelligence service, which now publishes a monthly magazine, MEED Business Review. The business also includes MEED Projects, a subscription-only service offering in-depth project tracking through its database; and MEED Insight, MEED’s premium research division.
Today, MEED is owned by GlobalData, a data analytics and consulting company, headquartered in London, UK, that acquired MEED Media from Ascential PLC in December 2017. The business is still growing, with more than 60 members of staff in its Dubai office.
