Keeping Tabs #18: Community wins, AI labels in Dubai, and a Forbes ME misstep
A weekly dose of news, views and things I’ve learned
I just reached a milestone life moment: half a decade as a parent. We celebrated my daughter’s 5th birthday today (pottery followed by pizza making) and it’s truly wild how time flies.
I hope you’re all having great weekends. I’m going to dive right in with news, views, and a new addition – some community wins.
✨ Subscriber wins!
🎉 Kudos to
, who just scored her first by-line in National Geographic (after spotting a call-out on Desert Prose 💅).🎙️ Congratulations to
, who not only just published her second novel but also bagged a great Substack Live interview with the inimitable Amy Suto.✈️
got her first commission from Atlas by Etihad Airways – also her first in-flight mag!🇸🇦 And a shout-out for Scott Campbell, who wrote this lovely piece about Saudi Arabia’s first tip-based tour for Conde Nast Traveller Middle East.
And now my news…
💼🧠 I’ve officially started offering one-to-one support to anyone who needs help with freelance life, pitching or building a platform (Substack, anyone?). These are focused, practical sessions for writers at any stage, and you can book a one-hour freelance strategy session or a half-hour Pitch Clinic slot (for anyone looking to turn an idea into a polished, publication-ready pitch). There are a couple of slots available each week and these are available to book here. If you’re a paid subscriber, please drop me a note before booking, as you get a 20% discount.
💡 In more Desert Prose news, we’ve got a couple of expert-led virtual workshops coming up. We’re talking self-care as a freelancer with an independent therapist on August 2nd, while a fractional operations director will guide us through why we need to treat freelancing more like a business (and how to do that). That’ll be on August 14th. Save the dates (paid subscribers only, FYI)! More details to follow soon.
📣 Today is the last day to submit an entry for the Save the Children’s Global Media Awards 2025, which honours journalists worldwide whose storytelling has played a role in highlighting critical issues affecting children. Categories include written news (print and online), broadcast, radio/podcast, and photography. Let us know if you enter and we’ll be rooting for you!
🤖 In local news, Dubai’s Crown Prince, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, approved the launch of a global classification system this week that differentiates between the role of humans and machines in the research, production and publication of content. There are five primary icons – to denote all-human, human-led, machine-assisted, machine-led, or all-machine-created content – plus nine more icons that indicate where the process of human-machine collaboration occurred (i.e. ideation, literature review, data collection, writing, visuals, etc.). It’s a thoughtful move – whether it’s widely adopted is another question. What do you think?
🧐 Also, did you see that Forbes Middle East job posting on LinkedIn this week? It was for a managing editor and they had written “British national preferred for global editorial perspective” as their top “qualification”. After a fair few comments from people pointing out the discriminatory nature of this line, they deleted and reposted it without that bit (I have a screenshot of the original). No acknowledgement, no apology. This is about a week or two after that other job posting I saw asking for “under 40s” only. I just wanted to double-check – we are in 2025, right?
🎨 Finally, on a more sombre, slightly off-topic note, today’s also your last day to see Jameel Art Centre’s exhibition in Dubai by Eltiqa, a 25-year-old Gazan art collective. I saw it on Friday and I highly recommend going if you can. I worked a couple of hours from the centre’s Michelin-recommended restaurant, Teible – something I also highly recommend, along with their plant-based cinnamon roll.
I wanted to highlight a particularly poignant point the curator made, as part of the exhibition, because it gave me shivers:
“The question of whether exhibiting art from Gaza now normalises the ongoing genocide remains, for us, a dilemma … The possibility of an audience produces the archive of an experience. However, this act is not without its ambiguities, as reflected in conversations with Mohammed Al-Hawajri [one of the artists], in his allusion to ‘pounding on the walls of the water tank’, where he draws parallels to Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novel Men in the Sun. In this story, the men, despite their persistent knocking on the water tank from within, remain unheard and ultimately succumb to a slow and torturous death.
If the artist is the one pounding, then we, the audience, become responsible for listening to their sound. Perhaps that which compels the artist to make the work should compel us to show it, not only in the hope but in the belief that, one day, it will stand as evidence to achieve justice in light of unspeakable injustice.”
If you don’t understand why I mentioned this, you might have missed the point.
Thank you so much for the shout out!