São Paulo – On the National Day of the Arab Community in Brazil, March 25th, the Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA) is launching its new site, aiming to improve on its job of promoting information exchange between Brazilians and Arabs. The update was designed to increase the contents and make the reader’s experience more pleasurable and fruitful.
ANBA is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2013, and it has been nearly five years since the site last underwent plastic surgery. Since, a lot has changed on the internet and in the way users relate to the web. News services that aggregate content from various sources have grown in number, there is a huge demand for different types of media, such as videos, audio, and pictures, aside from text, and social networks have become popular to such an extent that they have come to exert actual social power, as seen in the Arab Spring.
To stay alive amid this universe of information, one must innovate. That is why ANBA is releasing new sections today, such as ANBA in the World Cup, about economy and business news relating to the 2014 edition of the event, and Braziliana, a channel for economy highlights of the Middle East and North Africa press. In the Portuguese version of the website, the column is called Arabianas and works the other way around.
The home page now includes links to the agency’s profiles on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where readers will find additional material, such as photos and information that did not make their way into the articles published on the site. A calendar of upcoming economy and business events is also available, always focusing on Brazil’s relations with the Arab World, and an ad for the Arab Brazilian Chamber TV programme, produced by the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, which owns ANBA.
The ANBA overhaul is much more than merely aesthetical, but it does not change the best that the agency has to offer, i.e. its quest for exclusive material from a team of talented journalists, translated by seasoned professionals.
Thus being, our team has prepared a series of special articles for today, such as “Descendants in the vanguard,” about the sons, grandsons and great grandsons of Arabs who are outstanding in their lines of work; “The generous hand of the community,” which shows how the Arab colony’s charities work in São Paulo; “Michel Temer’s plans for the Arab world,” an exclusive interview with the vice president of Brazil; “The Red Sea Bride,” about a Saudi city that has been the main gateway of pilgrims headed for Mecca for centuries; “World Cup legacy still uncertain,” about what the 2014 FIFA World Cup will actually leave behind for Brazilians; “Further space for growth,” which retraces the development of trade between Brazil and the Arab World since 1989; “Few Arabs in the library,” about the presence of Arabic literature in the Brazilian publishing market; “From the small to the Arabs,” with stories of small businesses that export to the Middle East; and “Tradition, nature and…camels!,” a tour of Al Ain, the city that is the guardian of United Arab Emirates traditions.
We hope the material will make for enjoyable reading. Criticism and suggestions are more than welcome!
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
