iDiplomacy will have a lighter publishing schedule this holiday season. But we’ll still be posting links to interesting articles on Twitter (@idiplomacy). Here are a few:

The Turkish Foreign Ministry held its first teleconference Thursday.

Newsweek article on Abu Dhabi’s growing arts scene, including the company Twofour54 — “(named after the emirate’s geographical coordinates) [it's] a ‘content-creation community’ that encompasses a giant high-definition film studio, a state-of-the-art television and radio broadcasting center, a media-training academy, and a division to fund new projects. The goal is to produce high-quality indigenous films, TV shows, news, and even gaming specifically for the Arab world (move over, Mario Kart, here comes Hameed Humvee).”

James R. Gaines’ column in the New York Times, “Over 60, and Proud to Join the Digerati,” that talks about the continuing importance of storytelling as the print publishing model is upended by online media:

In the digital world, though, social networks are now bigger than most national populations, more people are consuming more news and information than ever before, and an archive of all the world’s knowledge is being built and streamed to your favorite device. This new world brings with it as much promise as pain. It’s like youth that way.

MEDIA will change as radically as technology allows, and right now the Internet is moving over the media landscape like a tsunami. But the job I learned to love when young was to tell stories, and the story has lost nothing in this transition. It is as elemental and as riveting as ever.