The princess diaries

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Princess Rym Ali swapped reporting for royalty when she married Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein. Now, she is venturing back into the press box with the launch of the Jordan Media Institute. Her Royal Highness sits down with Arabian Business to talk funding, freedoms — and being kicked out of Baghdad.

Interviewing royalty is nerve-wracking at the best of times. It is worse when your subject is a hard-bitten war reporter-turned-princess, whose CV eclipses yours.

“How is it to be on the other side of the table?” I ask Princess Rym Ali, wife of Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein. “Difficult,” she says immediately, and grins.

The topic, at least, is familiar ground. Princess Rym is in Dubai to talk media; or rather, the state of it in the Middle East. As an ex-journalist with stints at some of the world’s best press outlets under her belt — the BBC, CNN, and Bloomberg all dot her bio — she’s unusually well placed to judge.

Specifically, she’s talking up the launch of the Jordan Media Institute (JMI), which she founded in 2006 and is set to open its doors in Amman next year. Its aim is to churn out the crème de la crème of journalism graduates, to supply the region’s newsdesks with homegrown reporters that are as proficient in Arabic as they are in English.

“[JMI] came out of a lot of conversations with the media industry,” Princess Rym explains. “A lot of people complained of not being able to hire people at the highest levels, good journalists, critical thinkers who were able to write properly in Arabic.”

With an inaugural class of just 20, however, JMI will have its work cut out to set the region’s media industry alight.

“The emphasis is on quality,” she tells me; “quality training and quality content.”

‘Quality’ is a word that peppers her talk — she takes standards very seriously.

“We want it to be a haven for journalism, so that means training; that means research. We want to focus on a small number of students, but be able to train them properly.”

It’s perhaps not the best time to launch a journalism school. Courtesy of the downturn, newspapers are dropping like flies. The market value of the global media industry plunged to $409bn last year, a staggering dive of 47 percent on the previous year’s figure. With media outlets frantically dialling back their spending, there is a risk JMI’s class of 2010 may find the industry a cold and jobless place.

The yet-to-open Institute has already felt the pinch, with several promises of funding falling through — “we’re in the same boat as everyone else in that respect,” she concedes — but has been shored up by private backers including Zain and Saatchi & Saatchi.

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