In recent years, Arab news industries have been confronted with an unparalleled increase in demand for journalistic offers. In parallel, Internet penetration throughout the Arab world has increased significantly, leading to a shift of consumption away from traditional channels towards the digital realm. This article addresses the impact of those recent developments on a shared transnational communicative arena throughout the Arab world. It includes geographically disaggregated traffic data of 630 inductively collected professional online news sources. Using a network analysis approach, it has been assessed that indeed, cross-border consumption of professional online news is a common and general feature in the region. Traffic flows between the countries are highly diversified without patterns of sub-segmentation. At the same time, the strength of traffic flows reflects the traditional leading role of the media industries in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Yet, weaker traffic flows between the other Arab countries are common and diverse, leading to a high overall integration of the Arab transnational communicative arena within the digital realm.

Arab migration to Europe has triggered vast public debate on immigration and European identity. But how do Arabic-speaking groups perceive their European resident countries? This study departs from the crucial role of media arenas in orienting perceptions. Adopting the approach of agenda-setting theory, it analyses news coverage on France and Germany, performing a multilevel text analysis of 3109 news articles in Arabic and relating them to usage data. The analysis of issues showed that France is presented as an active stakeholder in foreign politics, whereas Germany is more strongly depicted in the realm of domestic politics.