Qatar is home (albeit mostly a temporary one) to numerous people from around the world, who comprise the vast majority of its population, with Qataris being a minority for decades now. As the exact breakdown by nationality is not something that is made publicly available by Qatar’s Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics (MDPS), I have embarked on collating as much data as possible on the subject, in order to shine a light on a matter of common interest. I started this project...

To start off with, we need to understand some basic realities and how they play out in Qatar’s online media landscape. Most publications in countries around the world have a more or less firm grip on their domestic audiences. For example in Lebanon, UK and India the residents of those countries mostly flock to their native media when they want to consume news online. Qatar, alongside most of the GCC stands in stark contrast to that.

Qatar’s business landscape at its highest echelons is an extremely tightly knit group, with individuals simultaneously owning or sitting on boards of numerous companies. We researched the top businessmen at 74 companies in Qatar and came up with a list of 264 individuals sitting on the boards or owning these companies.

Like any other public relations strategy, corporate blogging should be approached with clearly predefined goals and targets, which means don’t start a blog on your business’ website without having a clear strategy outlined.

Perhaps not surprisingly corporate or business blogging is not something Qatar based companies commonly utilize. Out of the 50 businesses and organizations which we analysed for the purposes of this blog post, only 20% of them use this online marketing technique to promote themselves.

I am no Middle East foreign policy expert but I know the GCC region and I didn’t expect the situation to escalate like this. It isn’t the first time the GCC countries have had their differences, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is quite obvious to the world now, the concerted efforts by Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi to isolate Qatar have nothing to do with the Emir’s alleged remarks.

Qatar, despite its rapid development and modernization, is still a tribal society at its core, at least when all the expats, who represent 88% of the population, are discounted for and the power structure of the country is analyzed. The following report delves into the most powerful families/tribes that are shaping Qatar both from political as well as economic points of view.

I have worked, as they say, both sides of the fence – as a journalist and editor, and as an in-house communications person handling PR and media relations. At my time doing the latter, the organization I worked for (Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar) was featured prominently by media – in Qatar and the region – on a regular basis. I was always asked how VCUQatar used to get so much coverage in the media. First and foremost it was because...

What I remember most about those early years in Doha was the sense of community and belonging. When Qatari grandmothers went shopping to the souq, they came back with boxes of goodies for children in every family in the neighbourhood.

The tiny desert nation has a population of about 2.6 million people (official figure from the Qatar Statistics Authority) with slightly over 10 percent comprising local Qataris. Authorities are very careful with releasing the exact number of Qataris, and figures available today have been arrived at through calculations from various data sources made public. The reason why, obviously, is because Qataris are such a huge minority in their own country.