For the first time since I started at Business Today, our magazine received letters to the editor. Not only is it great to get a feel for what our readers are thinking (see page 24), it reminds us how important it is to nurture this dialogue.

So let me take this opportunity to welcome all letters, emails and other means of correspondence (my contact details are listed below.) I will ensure that my team and I address your comments, concerns or questions within the magazine or via email. In fact, should the letters warrant publication, bt will devote one page near the front of our publication to your comments.

I will admit that we are not perfect, but we do aspire to a high standard of excellence. Our editors, art director, copy chief, designers and writers meticulously dissect stories and layout both forward and backward including the page you are now reading. I only rest easy when I know I’ve done all I can do to sincerely and with a clear conscience, send our copy to the printers with an error margin of less than 1%.

First, know your limits. Few can work 100 hours per week, function outside the newsroom and still have time to eat and get enough sleep. There are things in life other than the magazine, however farfetched that idea may seem after putting in a 16-hour day. This goes for all of our lives: With moderation there is equilibrium.

Second, know when to quit. Spending hour upon hour writing my editor’s note isn’t always feasible. The same goes for our designers — if they spend an hour tweaking one pie chart so that the figures are perfectly in sync, within a pica or millimeter in each case, eventually the human body will burn out.

Third, accept that there will be mistakes. Every book I’ve read in the past year has had more mistakes than I have fingers typing this page — even for the most heavily proofread and peer-reviewed, multiple-edition best-seller books. The same goes for the content of my daily digest of news feeds.

My admission is not to take away from the hard work of our proofreaders and editors, it simply emphasizes the complexity of the English language and the challenge to express ourselves correctly and consistently.

This is, of course, where you, the reader, enters the stage in the last act (or in this case, the magazine’s finished product), allowing the crux of the problem to come full circle.

We welcome your comments and hope that you will use this forum to point out not just where we forgot to transliterate a quote correctly but also to look deeper and ask whether the Sinai is an area of concern for developers (page 62) as senior writer Amr Aref posits. We’d also like to know what you have to add about fellow senior writer Passant Rabie’s look at Egypt’s growing, troubled pet industry (page 40).

We’ve done all we can this month: we’ve recognized our limits and accept that there could be mistakes. Now it’s time for you to be the judge. bt

I hope that you enjoy our issue.


Best wishes,


Robert Terpstra
Deputy Managing Editor