By Dmitrijs Zujevs
When I was editing for a major business media in Dubai, I had a front-row seat to something that took me a while to fully process: the gap between how companies think they’re perceived and how journalists actually think about them.
Press releases would arrive daily, hundreds of them. Most got deleted in under ten seconds. Not because the companies were bad or the news was unimportant, but because the pitch was written for an imaginary editor who had unlimited time, infinite patience, and no competing priorities. That editor doesn’t exist anywhere, at definitely not in a Gulf newsroom running on tight deadlines and a small team covering an entire region.
What got opened was different. It came from people the desk already knew. It was specific to what that publication actually covered. It had a story in it, not just an announcement. The distinction sounds obvious until you realise how rarely it’s applied.
After Dubai, I spent two years working inside the web3 industry — a space that, whatever you think of it, produced some of the most instructive case studies in reputation management I’ve ever seen. Projects would launch with genuine technical substance and immediately get outpaced in the narrative by competitors with better PR and shakier fundamentals. The market, at least in the short term, consistently rewarded the story over the product. I watched companies that were genuinely building something unique get ignored by mainstream business press while noisier, less serious operations dominated the coverage cycle, simply because they understood how the media game worked and the serious ones didn’t think they needed to.
When the market corrected, the dynamic reversed. The companies that had invested in credibility — real journalist relationships, consistent presence in outlets that actually mattered, founders who had said substantive things on the record- such companies had something to fall back on. The ones that had relied on hype and volume had nothing.
That pattern doesn’t belong just to web3. It plays out across industries, at every scale. The mechanism is the same: credibility built before you need it is an asset. The credibility you try to build during a crisis is a liability.
There’s a specific failure mode I kept seeing, both in Dubai and in the years since, that doesn’t get named clearly enough: companies that confuse activity with presence.
They send press releases. They hire a retainer agency. They get placed in a handful of trade publications and regional outlets. The monthly report looks reasonable. And yet when something actually matters — a funding round, a market entry, a reputational incident — nobody who needs to know about them actually knows about them.
The problem is usually that the activity has been optimised for volume rather than for the publications and journalists that their actual audience reads. A founder raising a Series B doesn’t need coverage in thirty outlets. They need one piece in the right outlet — the one that the investors they’re talking to read over breakfast. The difference in effort required to get there is significant. So is the difference in what it’s worth.
At Quorum Media, the first audit we run for any new client is exactly this: not how much coverage they have, but where it lives and who it actually reaches. The results are usually sobering and almost always clarifying.
The Gulf market is worth addressing specifically, because it gets treated as an afterthought by a lot of international communications strategies, and it shouldn’t be.
The GCC press ecosystem doesn’t work the way European or North American media does. The relationship between PR contacts and editorial teams is closer and more direct. Arabic-language and English-language coverage serve different audiences with different decision-making roles. The outlets that carry weight with institutional investors and government stakeholders in the region are not always the ones that international companies target first.
Companies entering the Gulf market with a press release written for a Western financial audience, distributed through a global wire, and no relationships in the regional press tend to get exactly what that approach deserves: silence. The ones that get traction have usually invested in understanding the market before they arrive — what the editors care about, what they write about, which outlets matter for which audiences, and how to tell a story that fits the context rather than just translating the one they tell everywhere else.
This isn’t a niche consideration. For any company with ambitions in the region, the GCC’s economic trajectory makes it increasingly relevant for businesses across sectors — it’s a foundational one.
The thread running through all of this is the same: communications work that’s built around the media environment as it actually operates, rather than the one that would be convenient to work in, produces categorically different results.
That means knowing which journalists cover your space and what they actually want. It means having a presence before you need one. It means understanding that the Gulf press, the London financial press, and the US tech press are three different conversations requiring three different approaches —definitely not one story distributed in three directions.
It’s not complicated. It’s just less convenient than sending the same press release to everyone and hoping.
Dmitrijs Zujevs is Chief Operating Officer at Quorum Media, a global PR and reputation agency with access to 15,000+ media outlets across NYC, London, and Dubai. His background spans international relations, editorial work at Arabian Business in Dubai, and two years inside the web3 industry — experience he now applies across Quorum’s media placement, crisis communications, reputation management, executive branding, and digital growth practices. He can be reached at hello@quorum-media.com