Arab Media Excellence Awards move artificial intelligence from theoretical debate to news production lines
The Was Academy for News Training won the Best Media Work Using Artificial Intelligence Technologies award in the tenth edition of the Arab Media Excellence Awards organized by the Arab League, for the work “These Jazan” prepared by trainee Ibrahim Ali Bakashi. The announcement, which came on the sidelines of the regular 56th session of the Arab Ministers of Information Council at the General Secretariat headquarters in Cairo, cements a new professional reality: automatic generation tools have moved out of isolated individual experiments to become embedded within official training curricula of newsrooms.
The results of the tenth edition reveal that the presence of artificial intelligence has expanded to reshape the competitive axes in the various editorial, radio and digital categories. This was evident in the victory of Mohammad Al-Qur’a from the Jordanian news agency Petra, who won the Best Digital Investigation award for a work that addressed the use of technology to combat fake news, alongside Wafaa Baloui winning the Opinion Column award for an article that examined professional ethics and the challenges of journalists enhanced by algorithms in newsrooms. The scene is completed by the report “The Last Journalist” by Majdolin bin Sharif, winner of the Radio Investigation award, and the note “Arab Media and Artificial Intelligence… Who Tells the Story” by Maha Awad, as well as Iman Akseil’s report on protecting religious reference.
Journalistic competition today is linked to the editor’s ability to audit machine outputs and safeguard the credibility of editorial content.This intensive presence of artificial-intelligence topics across various coverage media reflects an Arab institutional awareness that the technology touches the structural framework of news production and distribution, and raises urgent questions about information security, the narrator’s voice, and editorial independence in the face of generative models.
This shift carries direct operational implications for practitioners and editorial teams in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant. Professional precedence is no longer for those who master simple programming commands or rapid image generation; instead, the market value of talent has moved to skills in investigative auditing, digital forensic verification, and understanding the ethical standards governing automated publishing. Media graduates and newcomers find themselves facing new employment requirements that demand proficiency with artificial-intelligence tools as an integral part of field news-room routines, not as an added optional feature, especially as trainees’ projects reach official award platforms.
Organized institutional training has become the fundamental pivot between random individual initiatives and sustainable professional practice.Regional newspaper administrations face a clear need to restructure spending plans and qualification programmes, directing them toward editorial environments that integrate automation with investigative rigor. If you lead an editorial team or aspire to develop your career, the bet goes beyond monitoring software development to building operating standards that control its accuracy, because newsrooms that delay institutionalizing these competencies will find themselves unable to keep pace with the speed of production and verification quality together.