"Hour of Stone" .. a youth program that breaks the routine of isolating Corona in Qatar

Imad Murad - Doha

With football leagues around the world stopping and millions quarantining, the Qatari youth Abdulaziz Hamad Al-Nasr has found the opportunity to take advantage of these conditions to launch a useful and unique program on the Instagram platform.

Victory called its program "Hour of Stone", and it was devoted to discussing issues on the ground in the State of Qatar, especially those related to the spread of the Corona epidemic and domestic stone since the beginning of the epidemic in the region.

And the program achieved great fame inside Qatar within a short period, as it hosted a large number of inspiring personalities in the Qatari community, whether in the sports or health fields, with a high ceiling on freedom to address issues away from the routine of television and press interviews.

With a tablet computer and office lighting, Al-Nasr started its project, taking good advantage of the social media that he says removed distances and made everyone able to reach people, but the challenge for him is to provide a useful material for youth as the first audience for the means of communication.

Al-Nasr went to this work not far from his field of work, as he works as a sports broadcaster on BN Sport channels, and he worked before that on Al-Jazeera Media Network.

Adaptation of the conditions
The Qatari journalist tells Al-Jazeera Net that the worker in the media field can adapt the surrounding circumstances and use them to produce a useful product for the viewer, indicating that the idea of ​​the program started with the interruption of international periodicals and the imposition of home quarantine.

He adds that after staying at home, think about how to use that period, and he found that the Instagram platform allows direct broadcasting for an hour, so he considered using this watch in a live broadcast that benefits the community at this stage, and chose an appropriate name for the stage "hour of stone", dedicated to educating young people and providing General advice for the community.

Al-Nasr confirms that his work in the field of media added a lot to him, as he learned how to adapt the difficulties in order to produce a different media product, and said that his period of work in the Al-Jazeera Network that coincided with the Arab Spring revolutions honed his skills in this regard and contributed to the development of his media personality, and made him more capable To adapt difficult circumstances to media work.

After moving to the BN Sport title, Al-Nasr witnessed many sporting championships such as the World Cup, and participated in covering European leagues and Arab championships, and when the Corona crisis cast a shadow over the world, he felt the need to have a role in his society, so it was "a stone hour" his way of awareness. Corona risks.

The most prominent feature of the "Hour of Stone" program is the high ceiling for freedom in dealing with topics, where victory says that working through social media platforms gives the media the ability to work more freely, so the dialogues that he conducted were much richer as they skipped the routine dialogues into press interviews aimed at obtaining All that matters to people.

Bold questions
Al-Nasr exemplifies that during one of the program’s episodes, he asked questions of a health official in Qatar about the number of persons with coronas who work in the health sector in the country, the number of people in intensive care and the classification of their cases. Daily, and receive clear answers to all questions.

During the recent period, Al-Nasr hosted a number of well-known personalities at the local and even Arab levels, among them: Dr. Abdul Latif Al-Khalil, Chairman of the National Strategic Committee to tackle the Corona Virus affiliated to the Qatar Ministry of Health, the leader of the Iraqi soccer team, Ali Adnan, and the Qatari sports analyst Majid Al-Khulaifi, and the artist Qatari Nasser Al-Kubaisi.

Victory - whose account on the Instagram platform has exceeded 45,000 followers in a short period - did not expect the positive reactions that accompanied the episodes of the program, and the number of followers that has doubled from one episode to another, which is considered a great responsibility placed on him to choose the topics of the episodes or the guests who will appear with him in the program.

He revealed that he laid out a plan to continue the program after the end of the Corona crisis, by setting a weekly episode that would discuss the most important issues of public opinion in Qatar, and give followers all the facts about this issue by discussing opinion leaders in the country about it.

During the recent period, Al-Nasr received many calls from a number of officials in the country who praised the efforts undertaken by him, considering that these contacts and praises are an appreciation by the government for the educational efforts undertaken in these difficult circumstances that pass through Qatar and the world at large.

He pointed out that after the blessed month of Ramadan, the program will appear in a new suit, and will start with a news summary of the most important events that took place during this period, and will have specific dates.

The Qatari broadcaster called on educational institutions to give media students in different universities educational doses on how to use social media, as a new and future means that will actually affect the global media, and so that these students are up to date with their age that requires them to deal with these tools.