Media Spotlight: Meet Mohamed Omar – The Youngest Editor-in-Chief In Egypt

Editor’s Note: This article was edited to alter details about Mohamed Omar’s background. 

FilFan.com is the leading entertainment website in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region and Egypt. Launched in 2004, the Arabic language entertainment news portal offers in-depth coverage of movie and television news along with more than 100 events a year including: music festivals, movie premieres, and exclusive interviews with the most popular superstars in the MENA region.

The site is among the most creditable outlets in Egypt bringing in 1.5 million unique monthly visitors and 6-8 million page views a month. So who is behind the booming media outlet? 23-year-old Mohamed Omar, the youngest Editor-in-Chief in Egypt and Glambergirlblog’s first media spotlight inductee.

Omar joined the FilFan.com family in 2013, but has had a long journey in journalism before that. Born Cairo to a middle class family, Omar always had dreams and goals to work in the media field. At 12, he joined several press related activities where he landed “The Best Student Journalist” award. That award led him to the opportunity to work as an editor for a weekly entertainment tabloid at the age of 16. From there, Omar started a successful seven-year career in the entertainment journalism.

Now a Managing Editor at FilFan.com, Omar is the man in charge. “I start my day with the morning editorial meeting every day at 9:30. We check the trending topics in the MENA region. So I check what is trending on Google, what’s trending on Twitter, Facebook, and social media to start crafting the ideas we’re going to work on.”

Omar not only administers and maintains all the contents on FilFan.com, but he promotes the sites social media presence, expedites marketing activities, collects and analyzes visitor’s traffic and implements SEO methods to increase publicity, hits and engagement.

Having such a successful site, I asked Mohamed Omar what tips he could offer to other brands. “The first thing I would say in my personal opinion is never, ever favor anything over the experience of the reader. You have to have your main concern be the reader and how they are loving your content.”

Another tip Omar shared was, “The content must be relevant to what people are concerned about at the moment. What they are talking about, what they want to read about.” Lastly he added, “Use more visuals, GIFS, content curation, and present unconventional content to make reading it [your content] an exciting experience.”

For the future, Omar hopes entertainment news has the same spotlight in the news as politics and the regular news have in the Mena region. The only way Omar sees this happening is for all the media big heads to work together to make that happen.

Check out Mohamed Omar’s website at FilFan.com (@FilFan on Twitter) and keep up with the young media mogul @MohamedOmar on Twitter and on his website, MohamedOmar.com.

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Photo: Mohamed Omar