It’s who you know…

It’s who you know…

If you want real clout as a media organization, you need to get yourself a world leader as columnist. We’re working on it, but the National beat us to it.

June 17, 2010 5:17 by shafeer

The National has a new columnist, it would appear. Not much to write about there, you might say, and normally you’d be right, but this particular columnist represents quite a coup. Thursday’s edition of the UAE’s more high-brow national daily newspaper contains a 900 word column by David Cameron, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

You’d think Cameron would be a bit busy to churn out almost a thousand words for a newspaper half the world away, but there it is. Kipp assumes it was drafted up for him by an underling, but we’re not sure that matters.

What’s interesting is what the paper is doing: sending a pretty strong message about what the National stands for and who its friends are. No doubt Cameron’s cameo stems from the fact that Martin Newland, Editorial Director of the National, is pretty well acquainted with the current UK leadership, including being friends with Cameron himself.

Kipp is not intimidated though, not at all. In fact we’re inspired. And we think we have a few aces up our sleeve when it comes to that game. We’re busy planning a series of guest columns from some of our big contacts. Among them we’ve approached Barack Obama to start a film review, Vladimir Putin to cover gardening, and Queen Elizabeth to start a show biz column. How can it fail? So far we’ve got no response, admittedly, but we’re confident we’ll be bringing those articles to you any day now.

Or maybe not. As so often in business and life, the bottom line is who you know can count for an awful lot. And since Kipp’s 1998 Samsung mobile phone (with the pull up aerial and flip) doesn’t have the personal number of any world leaders just now, we’ll probably keep writing the stuff ourselves. Congratulations, National, you win this round.

But one thing we do want to know is: Does Cameron get the average freelance rate? If so kudos to him, he’s just supplemented his wage to the tune of hundreds of dirhams – at last, some good news for the UK economy.