garciamedia

Aug. 18th Published every Thursday, Xpress surprises, refreshes, titillates in Dubai

I am not so convinced it is always true, but I often hear that dogs get to look like their owners.

I am also told that sometimes newspapers totally reflect their editors. Such is the case with Dubai’s free, colorful weekly, Xpress. Its editor, Nirmala Janssen, could very well personify Xpress—-well, almost all of it.

XPRESSLY NIRMALA: Sassy, irreverent and courageous, Nirmala knows a good story when she smells it, and she has the guts to put it in her newspaper.  She looks in corners where other reporters were too busy to get down on their knees to search.  Her newspaper can be nosing around the hospitals of Dubai one day (“yes, medical mistakes here could cost you!”), but turn around and give you Brazilian bombshell Crystal Moura the next week (“Sex sells, my dear, especially on Page One”), and the word “taboo” is not in Nirmala’s vocabulary—-as in race or ethnic topics. One of her most popular stories of the summer, an expose of “Race for Taxis”. Indeed, she sent her reporters out in the busy avenues of Dubai and found out that “Dubai taxi drivers profile potential passengers according to race, nationality or how well dressed they are,” The preferred passengers: Westerners.

TOPLESS TOURISTS AND HIGH FLYING PILOTS: In between, Nirmala’s sampling of stories runs the gamut from “topless tourist girls that bare all” in beaches where this is not allowed, to an interview with the two pilots flying the first Emirates Airlines jumbo A380 on its maiden flight from Dubai to New York City.

“I am not interested in covering the school bus crash that everyone already has,“ says Nirmala. “ I am interested in that one story that the readers have heard nothing about till they read it in our Xpress.“

Sure, Nirmala, as in “Toilet paper thieves are raiding two Dubai malls—and leaving customers inconvenienced.”

So far, Xpress is a success, if one goes by the fact that copies run out almost immediately after it appears on Thursdays.

In a crowded newspaper market,  Xpress also manages to appeal to people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

“A good human interest story is the same to anybody,” Nirmala asserts.

In an exclusive interview, Gulf News editor-in-chief and veteran UAE journalist, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, discusses the state of the media in his country, from professional journalistic standards and ethics to freedom of the press.

 

In Dubai, taking pictures of the Burj Dubai, described as the tallest building in the world, and still under construction. Although buildings have never been an interest of mine, I have a child’s fascination with the Burj Dubai since the foundations were laid. I have followed progress of its construction, taking out my iPhone to shoot photos as I sit in traffic to and from the newspaper.

Go www.burjdubai.com for everything you want to know about the Burj Dubai. Yes, it will house the first and only Georgio Armani Hotel in the world, in addition to offices, residences, boutiques, a shopping mall.

Just when you thought you did not want or need anything else, I look up to the top of the Burj Dubai—-almost a kilometer high—-and I wonder what it would feel like to have a little condo there, close to the sky.

Not easy to run in Dubai in August. I either get up at 6 and go out already in plenty of heat, or do it in the evening.  Tonight I kept looking for camels around the camel race track. Not one camel in sight. Too hot, I assume, and perhaps they are all lying around in air-conditioned stables. But, alas, upon returning to the hotel I see the sculpture of the camel by the door.

They say everything turns to silver or gold in Dubai. Including camels.

 

Posted by Dr. Mario R. Garcia on August 18, 2008