Ammar Bakkar
Head of New Media
Ammar is the Head of New Media at MBC Group, one of the largest media organisations in the Middle East. As the Head of New Media, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya, a news portal associated with Al Arabiya News Channel. He also manages several other projects for MBC Group, including websites such as anews.net & mbc.net, the interactivity for all MBC channels and Al Arabiya, Al Arabiya mobile news services and MBC Mobile Project.
Ammar has been in the new media industry since the year 2000, when he established BAB, one of the earliest Arab news portals. Later, he established several portals until he joined MBC Group in 2003. Since 1996, Ammar is also a columnist on the issues of e-journalism and cyber communication, and he introduced a weekly radio show on Radio MBC that deals with these issues.
Ammar holds a doctoral degree from the University of Oklahoma (USA), where he studied political campaigning on the web and creativity enhancement in media organisations. He has more than 15 years of experience working for the traditional media as a journalist, a correspondent, and a Chief Editor with several Saudi and international publications.
Until recently, Ammar managed the "September 11th media and research program" in Riyadh. Under this program, he wrote a book titled "September 11th: An Arab View", and produced a documentary that won "the best professional film" award by the Arab Documentary Festival in Beirut. Since 2003, Ammar has a weekly column in Aleqtisadiah Newspaper that deals with issues related to the Arab world reform from different aspects.
Moreover, Ammar has been a PR and media consultant to several government, private, and non-profit organisations in Saudi Arabia. Ammar has also been a speaker at several academic & international media conferences. Within the last year, Ammar has given presentations on New Media at the Middle East Conference (Denmark, 2005), Media Education and Training in the Arab World (Riyadh, 2005), Eurasian Media Forum (Kazakhstan, 2006), in addition to a presentation on mobile content at the Middle East Media and Telecoms convergence Conference (Jordan, 2006), and another one about new media to Arab Broadcast Forum (Abu Dhabi, 2006). Ammar is a member of the Academic Committee of the Saudi Association for Media & Communication. During the years 2004 and 2005, he was also an adjunct mass communication professor at the American University of Sharjah.
Ammar is a Canadian citizen and a resident of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Keynote: Content Technologies - What do people do with them?
Thursday, November 9th, 9.15
The media industry is rapidly transforming itself toward multimedia-based content. This has major implications for the web. Digital platforms should not only be able to accommodate the future but also to guide it. The media industry could use the help of the industry, but only when the masters of systems start thinking like media people.
This keynote will discuss the new media future vision, the implications of this vision for the industry, and how the industry can use this revolution to its maximum advantage. In essence, the keynote is a fresh look, by a media person, at content technologies and what they can do for the media industry in the coming ten years.
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