Bloomberg news and Saudi Arabia’s MiSK Foundation have teamed up to launch a course on financial reporting to train aspiring Saudi journalists, according to a report in Arab News.
The intensive week-long course is taught at the Bloomberg Middle East headquarters in Dubai. 30 Saudi undergraduates, including 22 women and eight men, were chosen by MiSK from “a large pool of applicants.”
New York-based Bloomberg, along with news agency Reuters, is often in the lead on western reporting on Saudi Arabia business, social, and political developments. The publication landed one of the first interviews with the Kingdom’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2016.
Students at the Bloomberg/MiSK course in Dubai. Photo via Arab News.
The course is being run by Matthew Winkler, who cofounded Bloomberg News with Michael Bloomberg in 1990.
Saudi media has opened up significantly in the last decade, and as the Kingdom continues its modernization drive, will play a key role in informing the public on the developments of Vision 2030.
“We want to inspire in them an aspiration to pursue a career in financial businesses and news organizations. When Bloomberg began 28 years ago, we had no lineage and no pedigree, but we wanted to be the best, so it was essential we had a method as well as an aspiration,” Winkler said. “In the 21st century, Saudi Arabia is an important country that wants to participate in global markets, and Bloomberg can provide access to data points for markets and companies. Very soon, Saudi Aramco will want to be assessed in terms of its relative value to its peers around the world, and that is all about transparency,” Winkler said.
