The medium is the message

Omayma Abdel-Latif talks to the man behind the new BBCArabic.com and finds out why users across the Arab world stop here first
When the BBC's Arabic service launched its revamped Web site in November 1999, a formidable set of obstacles still lay ahead. The quest to position the site as the online news source for the Middle East region was fraught with unknown trials, not the least of which were the slew of industrious news outlets mushrooming on the Net -- particularly those targeting Arabic-speaking users. Today, BBCArabic.com is a must-bookmark for newsmen and Netizens alike around the Arab world.
"Our site was meant to be the only Arabic news provider on the Internet that offers comprehensive round-the-clock news and full multimedia capacity," Hossam Al-Sokkary, head of BBCArabic.com, told Al-Ahram Weekly during a recent visit to Cairo. The re-launch of BBCArabic.com was not simply about taking the all-too-mundane online plunge, explained Al-Sokkary; it was a matter of re-tooling the Web site to draw a different kind of Internet user -- the kind who would respond to a new medium of information exchange.
Al-Sokkary built a sizeable following as a presenter for the BBC radio service programme "Tales of the Electronic Café", which launched his career and earned him a reputation for Internet savvy. "Our target user was not the people who listen religiously to the BBC every day," Al-Sokkary said. "We wanted to address a new generation of Internet users emerging in the Arab world." It is the battle for this "new" generation that has exasperated many a news portal in the past couple of years. BBCArabic.com, nonetheless, persevered and the volume of traffic monitored during the first few months after the revamp was significantly higher than anything the site had ever received.
Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks facing the BBCArabic.com team was how to turn a radio station into an online service. Arbitrary decisions had to be made, says Al-Sokkary. "This is not a radio service on the Net, as many expected it would be. While we tried to maintain the shape of a radio service -- we still use audio streams -- the material we are offering had to be reproduced altogether, in a way that suits the needs of a different kind of user," he said. Re-conceptualising the output, however, left a few listeners-turned-users disgruntled. Many visitors demanded more audio output, and one even went as far as suggesting that all the radio service's programmes should be available and archived, going back to when the service was established some 60 years ago.
Not possible, was Al-Sokkary's immediate answer -- "more for technical reasons" than any other, he said. The site does offer standard audio services like the live audio stream, and other audio output, including some programmes. It also features the latest bulletins -- a feature aimed at the far-flung Arab diaspora. "The medium determines the way the content is going to be received by users," Al-Sokkary notes. "While some newspapers maintained the same old format of their print edition when they went online, we wanted to do something different."
Less than a year after the re-launch, the site was a success story. In August alone, the number of visitors was comparable to the amount the site used to get per year before the revamp. The Arabic online service emerged as the fastest growing service among the BBC's World Service and was granted the best news service site award for the year 2000 by the Arabian business.com site.
Al-Sokkary attributes the site's success to two factors that it has always had: the BBC brand name and its no-profit status. An established name like the BBC has the credibility of a responsible organisation and because it is a public service, it is trusted over profit-making organisations. The site's new-found glory simply follows some smart re-packaging -- a point that might be taken up by other news portals with flagging visitorship. While the Internet was supposed to be the great equaliser, studies show that the powerhouses in most industries will still prevail: traditional media brands like the BBC, or CNN, are recognisable to the user and, perhaps more importantly, have the financial and marketing resources to back up their endeavours.
On the matter of competition, Al-Sokkary is confident that BBCArabic.com will continue to stand apart from the rest. In the last few years, numerous Arab-oriented sites have been crowding cyberspace and a lot of real money has been poured into building virtual operations, but Al-Sokkary is unfazed. "This doesn't worry us, because we are unique in many ways," he boasted. "We have a history that goes back more than 60 years and a very wide base of customers. It is very important to have this kind of credibility in a virtual operation."
The BBCArabic.com site has one thing over many other news sites -- it is modest with what it claims to do, and thus has not fallen prey to over-hype. The home page, devoted to news items that are updated hourly, is not cluttered with too many items. Some regular features include "Arab Affairs in the British Press" and "Science and Technology" and the site hosts different news files and regular polls on current affairs. Certain topics -- like sports -- are conspicuously lacking, but Al-Sokkary points to a shortage of resources still holding them back. He says there is no point in wasting effort on something that won't bring in eyeballs.
Al-Sokkary has dismissed recent reports that the BBC is considering adding a "banner" -- a strip for online advertising -- to its site. Covering his tracks, he added that even if banner ads became part of the site, the service remains the same for the consumer. "We are part of the BBC World Service and our charter dictates that we are not a for-profit operation." Even if the BBC were to choose to include advertising and content from other sites, Al-Sokkary insisted, the regional site will continue to operate for free, particularly when the Arabic service site has proved such a tremendous success.
One thing Al-Sokkary is evidently concerned with is making browsing less laborious, and he takes user suggestions seriously. Though he admits that no surveys of market potential were done before the site was re-launched, he claims that user testing is going on all the time to detect potential problems users are likely to come across. The user-testing techniques include not only the number of visits to the site, but also the length of each session and the features that attracted more hits than others. "Sometimes we put up stuff that looks pretty cool and nice, but the problem is that when it reaches the user on the other end of the line, a different picture might come out and the feature might not be as well received as we expected," he said. "It is important to know why users get frustrated -- which features are the most visited and which are not. It becomes an obsession of wanting to offer more."
Al-Sokkary is tight-lipped about BBCArabic.com's budget, but he maintains that the organisation's resources are limited, making it difficult to keep pace with the fast-changing Internet scene. Even so, he hinted at new plans to add more features and offered a taste of what is to come: an electronic guide to what's going on in London.
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