My first serious attempt to write online was through blogging, and that’s how many people have come to know me. My original blog Saudi Jeans, launched in 2004, was one of the first in the region and remained active until I moved to New York for graduate school.

This new blog, however, is not a revival of the old one as doing that would cause a conflict with my current job as a reporter for the Financial Times. Instead, a good way to think about this site is to view it as a companion to my reporting work for FT.

In some cases that will mean providing additional context to stories I’ve written, including stuff that didn’t make it to publication either for editing or space reasons. In other cases I will seek to link to related stories and highlight some issues that probably don’t merit writing a full news story but still worth more than a tweet. Many journalists (and non-journalists) do a similar thing these days using Twitter threads, but I just find that format clunky and inelegant.

Now I’m not sure how frequently I will be posting stuff here, but I hope I can do that regularly enough to get back into the habit of blogging, and I hope that you might find some value in it. Cheers!