It’s 11 a.m. in mid-June and ten section editors have crowded around the table at the center of The National’s newsroom on the ground floor of a nondescript office building in Abu Dhabi for the morning lineup meeting. The hushed newsroom is sleek and informal. Reporters don’t sit in cubicles but at long rectangular tables, in front of flat-screen monitors. Six large plasma televisions hang from the ceiling, tuned to BBC World or Al-Jazeera. The air-conditioned chill betrays the Arabian summer outside, where it’s 120 degrees and a sandstorm is blanketing the city. A waiter wearing a yellow vest and a black bowtie delivers coffee and tea, and the meeting begins.

“So, what kind of trouble are we in today?” asks Martin Newland, forty-seven, The National’s editor-in-chief. He spreads his palms on the table and pauses. “About this video,” he says. One of the section editors stops doodling in her notebook and another quietly sets down his teacup. Everyone turns expectantly toward Newland.

Apart from the sandstorm, everyone in the newsroom this morning is talking about how—or even if—Newland will handle the juicy story that The Associated Press put on the wire hours before. Still frames of videotapes have emerged showing a man who appears to be Sheikh Issa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, torturing former business associates with a cattle prod and a spiked plank.

Newland furrows his brow and gazes into the distance. It’s a solid, well-sourced story about a public figure that would make it into most North American and British dailies. But for Newland, a former editor of London’s Daily Telegraph, many of the news impulses that work elsewhere just don’t apply here.

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