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 Media Week’s editorial staff has left the building, it seems. The current roster of writers and editors have now either left, or are serving their last days today, leaving the Emirates Neon Group magazine without an editorial team, for the moment.
Although no-one’s saying as much on the record, AdNation understands the team quit over unpaid wages. Dues for some staff remain unpaid since the summer, we hear.
ENG publishing director Mike Orlov didn’t comment directly on the suggestion that ENG wasn’t paying its staff, but described the current employment situation as “volatile” and said ENG wished its former Media Week employees all the best.
“It’s a very difficult market situation. A very high number of companies are owed a great deal of money by their customers, which has led to problems with companies meeting their requirements, and ENG, amongst many other businesses, has suffered,” said Orlov.
“I think it would be invidious to point the finger just at ENG; you’d have to look at very many companies, not only in Dubai, not only in the UAE, not only in the GCC, but around the globe, who’ve had real problems meeting their immediate commitments due to the fact that their customers are finding it very difficult to pay them,” he added.
Orlov also pointed out that ENG was a very young publisher, while the majority of its business remained in the signage and outdoor advertising sectors.
Both signage and outdoor were of course the most immediate and hardest-hit victims of the Dubai real estate crash at the tail end of 2008, leaving the entire industry – ENG included – desperately short of cash.
Orlov said: “Clearly we’ve had very, very high levels of commitment and outlays from us, to fulfil contracts for which we’re waiting to be paid.”
As we’ve stated before, we do have a certain, very limited, amount of sympathy for ENG, given the timing of its foray into publishing. Unsurprisingly, this sympathy is unlikely to be shared by staff waiting to be paid.
Back to Media Week, and Orlov suggested it will have a new team in place shortly: “Let’s just say that there are bodies that will be arriving, there are experienced people who will be with us to look after the title.”
We’ll be curious to see who these bodies are, in light of the reasons behind the last lot leaving.
In the meantime, we gather that the outgoing team has banked some material, so there may well be a couple of issues that appear in the meantime – although to date the last one to appear was the 2009 wrap-up edition, dated 20 December.
As for ENG’s other titles, Orlov described the staff situation as “very positive”. An anonymous email suggested that the other three magazines are also suffering acute staffing problems, although not to the point of Media Week.
Orlov was eager to point out that while around 100 magazines are said to have shut in Dubai in the last 12 months, none of ENG’s titles have been among them.
“It would be an error to compare ENG to just another publisher. I don’t think there’s another publisher which launched magazines in 2008, and started publishing, which is still operating,” said Orlov.
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