Faisal J. Abbas, Marketing Communications MA alumnus, has been elected as the Deputy Chairman of the Saudi Journalists Association.
Faisal is the Editor-in-Chief of Arab News, the Middle East’s leading English-language daily newspaper. Prior to this, he was Editor-in-Chief of the digital English service of the Al-Arabiya news channel, media editor at pan-Arab London-based daily Asharq Al Awsat.
Faisal is credited with expanding Arab News from a national newspaper to an international, digitally-savvy news resource in various languages including Japanese and French. Faisal has previously been awarded the British Next Century Foundation’s Cutting-Edge Award 2009 for efforts in bridging the communication gap between the West and the Arab World, and British Council’s UK alumni Social Impact award in Saudi Arabia in 2017. Faisal is a renowned columnist on Arab-international affairs and appears regularly on international media to offer his insights on Arab affairs. He has previously spoken at Harvard, SOAS, LSE and LBS. He is an honorary member of the Cambridge Union Society, and a member of both the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Society of Authors (SoA).
The Saudi Journalists Association was founded in 2003 to “boost the role of the press and its message and grant journalists more confidence, security and a sense of responsibility towards their country and people”.
The elections were held last month in Riyadh. Faisal’s appointment as Deputy Chairman was confirmed after his Future Coalition, where women form 45 percent of the members, won the elections by a large margin.
Speaking about his election, Faisal said: “It is a big honour and responsibility for me to serve my country, my industry and my fellow journalists - whether they voted for our coalition or not - in a field that I am well versed in and incredibly passionate about. I hope to be able to deploy many of things I learned in London, be it on campus and beyond, to strengthen the Saudi Journalists Association and improve the status of journalism in my country. I will let the work speak for itself.”
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