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AIPS VP Zsuzsa Czsistu on stage with at the Global Media Congress
Csisztu Zsuzsa – AIPS Vice President
ABU DHABI, November 27, 2023 – Unimaginable dimensions greeted participants at the Global Media Congress in Abu Dhabi for the second time – building on last year’s success – during the three-day international event, which featured an exhibition, plenary sessions, stage debates and professional workshops. It’s worth gripping the arm of the chair a little, because the event in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, hosted by the ADNEC International Events Centre, which simultaneously hosted five global congresses, attracted nearly 24,000 visitors from 172 countries to this gathering of the media world.
FIVE BROAD AREAS 80 of the world’s leading media industry executives gave presentations or participated in on-stage discussions, while 257 exhibitors – all from the press and media business – introduced themselves to visitors. Television and radio broadcasting, content production, the technology needed to produce it, the latest tools and hardware essential for reporting, as well as the latest innovations in social media platforms – these were the five broad areas into which the organisers have divided the conference.
BRAVE NEW WORLD While in one of the exhibition halls, a robot policeman waved at an all-electric car miracle from the Abu Dhabi police and loudly offered us the choice of asking for our driver’s license in Arabic or English, robots flying around the big stage high-fived the spearman to prove that the brave new world had arrived.
This one thing – that it is the present – was the most agreed upon by the speakers and panelists, who discussed, for example, their enthusiasm or concern about artificial intelligence (AI), which dominated nearly seventy percent of the topics. AI has kicked in the door this year as we have entered an era of info-technology revolution, where chatbots, Chat GPT – and other ‘market’ players have not only emerged from the ‘darkness of the server room’, but have also made it clear to professionals who were previously unaware of their existence that they have the potential to rewrite the media market. But how? And do we even want to?
TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS As part of one of the panel discussions, I had the opportunity to talk about how some of the technological and spectator experience tools in sports media, such as the one used at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, have been a great success with «consumers». For example, thanks to chip technology in the start numbers, spectators can now see not only how many tenths or hundredths of a second a runner is behind on the track, but also how many metres or centimetres are between runners thanks to precise positioning. But there’s also VDM, (Video Distance Measurement) technology, which uses cameras capturing 2,000 frames per second from all angles – the human eye can detect roughly 30-60 frames per second – to mark the length of a long jumper’s or triple jumper’s attempt to the nearest millimetre, while showing the jumper himself in 3 dimensions in slow motion.
REGULATION IS KEY Yes, there is added value, and perhaps even technological dominance has its place in the service of the consumer experience, but everyone is taken aback when at the end of a newspaper article – if it is written at all – it says that what we have read, seen or heard is an AI-generated content. Charlie Beckett, Professor at the London School Of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a leading expert on artificial intelligence, sees a window of opportunity in the technological explosion. He says that while we, for example, rely on Chat GPT to look at an article we’ve written or edit a shorter version of it, perhaps with a map or diagram, a ‘traditional’ journalist or sports reporter can take advantage of the time saved to go out into the field and gather real content.
But then there’s Joshua Ball, a sports journalist at the Hong Kong-based South China News Agency, who reported that they have to mark at the end of all content that is bot-generated and written or produced by a real human journalist. They believe in this for now, and in regulation as soon as possible, although they work for a very large market, so they could do with a bit of «simplification». The importance of regulation may be the key,» replied former BBC editor-in-chief Chiyo Robertson, who also joined the ranks of those who believe in early international, global or local regulation and who continue to believe that the human element, the human factor, the personality of stories, remains a fundamental journalistic virtue that only human beings can provide.
GROWING FEMALE AUDIENCE On the main stage I had the chance to talk to Brazil’s number one female football commentator, the ever-popular Luciana Mariano. Luciana covers both men’s and women’s football matches for ESPN Brazil, and it was immediately apparent that the GMC organisers were keen to engage with the growing female audience in the affluent Middle East region, and to be among the innovators in the Arab world, as well as to open up to as many young and ambitious women as possible within the sports journalism profession, regardless of strict religious or social background.
PROMOTING AIPS INITIATIVES In several interviews, I felt it was important to highlight AIPS’ initiatives, the AIPS Sport Media Awards global competition for professional sports journalists, and how empowering women in sports media congresses and workshops can help women in the profession worldwide.
MEDIA BOOM IN THE GULF The most striking phenomenon, however, was that although the conference was attended by representatives from 172 countries, the Gulf region’s explosive media boom is sweeping almost every other region off the world map. Years ago, Arabic-language television and news broadcasting in the Western world was identified nearly only with Al-Jazeera, but today one of the richest, sixth most populous, so-called modern standard Arabic-speaking parts of the world is home to a media industry with a technical background and quality that rivals any in the world.
