Brit Martin Newland, the founding deputy editor of the National Post, is now helping start up a brand-new paper in the United Arab Emirates. Here's some of his thoughts on that process and on journalism in his former colony.

From the Feb. 16 Globe and Mail:

The trouble with Canadian journalism, he says, was that it was mind-numbingly boring. "Small population, huge, beautiful country, and yet nearly every bit of their programming from the CBC winge-fests was miserable: Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. They never shut up about cancer."*

* Ironically, on the day I post this, CBC's The World At Six had the N.L. cancer scandal story as its lead item. :)

LIKE THE NATIONAL POST

It is hardly surprising that Mr. Newland talks about his past in Canadian journalism when asked about the future. In many ways, the road ahead evokes memories of when Ken Whyte, the former editor-in-chief of the Post, called on him to pull up stakes and move his family to Canada.

It's very like the National Post, where we came in and it was just a complete wasteland, and out of it grew a fully functioning national newspaper," he says. "It's also very similar in the sense that, in a lot of what you did in Canada, you had to do from nothing."

And what about the Post now? He doesn't read it: "Obviously I think it's a shadow of its former self, but I have to admit that its former self in term of its funding was perhaps not realistic. When Conrad sold it to the Aspers, the attention span was broken and it was seen increasingly as a commercial proposition. Of course, it didn't make sense as a commercial proposition."

Here are some of his thoughts on the process of starting a newspaper from scratch a second time. The proprietor is the Abu Dhabi Media Co., which is owned by the government.

"What we're trying to do is join the dots and start a national conversation because right now there is none. To create a sense of belonging and awareness because there's a lot happening here, which has a very good message for the rest of the world," he says.

WORLD-HIGH INCOME

It's a huge challenge in the UAE, where most of the 1.5 million residents are immigrants with little in common. Abu Dhabi has the world's highest per-capita income, but local, wealthy Emiratis rarely mingle with the growing ranks of expatriates who range from poor South Asians to money managers from London and New York.

On the surface, there seems to be little to bind everyone together, but Mr. Newland begs to differ: "The single thing these people do have in common is the English language and a love of newspapers."

In the West, newspaper circulation is shrinking because of the rising cost of newsprint and declining readership. Here, newspapers are considered a growth industry, with local rulers seeking the prestige that comes with the launch of a print publication.

"It's almost like a time warp for us. We're going back to the mid-nineties, the dot-com boom, when you could grow sections because of the advertising dollars pouring in."

Hassan Fattah, who was hired from The New York Times to be Mr. Newland's deputy editor, has a slightly darker take: "I get to help architect what is arguably the last newspaper to be created."

Both men brush off concerns that the paper will be censored because government money comes with strings attached. The existing English-language press in the Gulf is notoriously timid and tends to shy away from the kind of hard-hitting journalism they believe in.

And they are seeking success where others have failed. Nearly two years ago, Frank Kane, formerly The Observer's business editor, was hired by Andrew Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, to help set up what was to be the Financial Times of the Emirates.

But tensions between the editors and the paper's government proprietors resulted in the lifting of its licence before it even began to publish. It was a huge blow to Mr. Kane, who says Western journalistic sensibilities are bound to clash with local owners and culture: "Martin is an incredibly professional editor and exceedingly competent, but he will undoubtedly face interference. ... His success will be judged on how well he keeps these people off his back."

Requests for an interview with officials at Abu Dhabi Media were deflected to Mr. Newland, suggesting it's reluctant to appear to be interfering. And he says censorship isn't an issue. "I've so far had more freedom here to construct the paper and to hire than I've ever had in Canada or the U.K."

Not that he is looking to pick a fight over freedom of the press. "I am not Mel Gibson and this is not Braveheart. My first priority is to create a quality daily that is very good in journalistic terms. Will I have problems with censorship? To be honest, I don't know and I suppose I'll be finding out," he says. Besides, newspapers face greater dangers than censorship. Convergence has resulted in "managers heading for the hills, tearing their hair out and shutting down bureaus, thinking there is a fantastic solution to everything in the ether. In the course of that, journalism and the public interest that it's served has suffered."