Ever wonder what the inside of a modern newsroom in the UAE looks like?

Feel free to have a look at this brief video done by a multi-media staffer, and you can see the interior of The National newsroom, as well as lay eyes on a couple of people you might know.

Your humble correspondent can be seen five times in the first 50 seconds.

The first is my hands spinning a Bic pen. (It had to be a Bic.)

The second has a stiff, unnatural person sitting across the table, aware of the camera and also aware of a lifelong tendency to neither sit nor walk straight.

The next is a moment with the back of my head in the foreground.

The fourth is yours truly reading a portion of the sports budget. And the final is the sports editor pictured from behind.

The settings are throughout the newsroom. It opens with Bob Cowan, the editor, speaking in his office. Then come several shots of the big, round table in the middle of the newsroom, where section heads and other editorial staffers gather twice daily for news meetings.

The first meeting is at 11 a.m., and makes sure everyone knows about the predictable stories already planned, with some news from overnight.

The second meeting is at 4 p.m., and this is where more decisions on the front page are made: The four or five stories that make the cover, the four or five items that are entered into the “digest” of shorts, also on the cover, and then the three visual concepts, the reefers, that will be placed in boxes at the top of the cover.

Sports usually has a digest item and at least one of the reefers.

Anyway, look at the video and you get a sense of where we work. Sometimes you will see interesting things that are not intended to be the focal point of the video. Stuff in the Background. Not revelatory, but interesting.

A couple of notes:

The newsroom is not as old as you might imagine from looking at the Knights of the Roundtable meeting. As in most places, editors skew old.

It gives you an idea of what Emirati women, especially, wear to the workplace. The black abayas and shaylas that are, practically, a national uniform for women. (The men having the white, body-length kandura robe, with ghutras covering their heads.)

And, if you watch towards the end, you will see a “cluster” editor some of you might know.

Anyway, thought it a good idea to post this. Those of us in the newspaper business always assume everyone else has an idea of what it looks like in there … but many people, in fact, do not.