Abu Dhabi Media Company, the signer of my paychecks, has just announced its purchase of the regional broadcast rights to Formula One for the next three years. It's hardly a surprising announcement, given that Abu Dhabi just invested heavily in building a Formula One Grand Prix circuit last year and has a vested interest in expanding F1 fandom in the region, but an interesting one nonetheless.

OK, maybe that's not the best name for them. (But then, how many people would have guessed that Apple was going to go with iPad?) Whatever it is called, Twitter's advertising platform is coming in about a month, according to Media Post.

Can the Middle East market support an Arabic-language version of a top-shelf Western business magazine? The last one, Forbes Arabia, shut down in April of last year when its parent company, DIT Group, closed down all of its titles.

This week, Iceland's parliament will be debating one of the most radical media proposals to be floated in a long time: the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. In essence, the plan aims to fix some of the damage that the country's banking crisis did to its economy by making Iceland a haven for journalists. As the New York Times notes, it's a bit of a hodge-podge of the best of free speech protection legislation from around the world: a bit of source protection law from Belgium, some whistleblower laws from the US, and most interestingly, some New York State laws designed to block "libel tourism" cases, essentially the practice of suing in Britain's notoriously tough courts for pieces written anywhere in the world, just because they were published online.

One of the more unfortunate things about the economic downturn's timing is that it has come just as the media industry is going though a radical transformation (some would say amputation) at the hands of digital technology. That means it's really hard to figure out where the damage is coming from. How much of global adspend's 0.2 per cent drop last year was economic hardship, and how much was structural change? And how can people in the business of making and selling media really make decisions until they know?

First there were the Abu Dhabi campuses of NYU and the Guggenheim. Then there was the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. And now, the latest institution of New York City culture  franchising itself to the Gulf is the Qatar edition of T Magazine, the New York Times' style magazine.

Behind all the flash bulbs and sobbing -- yes, I heard at least one journalist let out a star-struck wail at the sight of Shahrukh Khan descending from the podium -- at yesterday's premiere of My Name is Khan at Emirates Palace was a quiet little business story. The film is being distributed through a partnership of Fox Star Studios, a joint venture between India's Star TV and News Corp, and Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a wholly owned subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media Company, which also owns and publishes The National.

Shahrukh Khan, lead actor of the movie My Name is Khan, was in Abu Dhabi yesterday to promote the world premiere of the film. (Rich-Joseph Facun / The National)

It marks the second time in less than a year that ADMC has partnered with a News Corp subsidiary. The first was the launch of the National Geographic Abu Dhabi channel, a partnership between ADMC's television arm and National Geographic Channels International, a joint venture between the National Geographic Society and News Corp.

The third Arab Media Outlook, released today, offered a hopeful alternative to the doubts raised in my post yesterday: The Middle East online advertising industry won't have to sustain itself on a measly one per cent of the region's total adspend much longer. The Dubai Press Club and their partners at Value Partners project that the internet will take up four per cent of the $6.3 billion spend on advertising in the region in 2013.

One per cent. As just about anybody in the Middle East's digital media industry how much of the region's advertising spending goes online, and he won't hesitate before delivering this much-repeated number. If he is an optimist, he will say two per cent. The point remains the same: despite all the reports touting the rapid growth of the Middle East's digital sector, despite Yahoo's industry-edifying purchase of Maktoob last year, despite the predictions that the recession's demands would push more people into advertising online, the industry has not managed to put its money where its mouth is.

JWT dominated this year's MENA Cristal awards, winning top prizes in the media, promo and direct, corporate and magazine categories. Leo Burnett won the top outdoor, daily press, film and integrated prizes. Here are the full results, with more awards available on the MENA Cristals site: