A new "free" newspaper in the Arab world?

In the shadows of its more flamboyant Dubai relative, the UAE's capital has methodically been working to establish itself as a cultural hub in the Middle East.

As my colleague Hannah Allam wrote earlier this year, Abu Dhabi "is emerging as the more sophisticated and responsible emirate."

Abu Dhabi is slated to become home to branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. France's Sorbonne is opening a campus. And the UAE capital is getting a new opera house.

Taking part in this cultural evolution is The National, a new, English language daily newspaper with a staff peppered with respected Western journalists.

The paper is owned by the Abu Dhabi government, but editors at The National say they will chart an independent course.

"Being government owned does not equal being goverment run," said Hassan Fattah, a former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times who is now deputy editor of The National.

But the paper's mission has already been questioned because of the leak of a memo from Martin Newland, editor of The Nation who used to lead The Daily Telegraph in England.

"We are not here to fight for press freedom," Newland wrote to his staff.

"I can tell you now that every application from a journalist wanting to come and work here who has included in his or her portfolio an 'investigative' piece about labourers’ living standards has gone straight in the bin," Newland wrote. "Not because the theme is unworthy—it is and we will do it—but because we are looking for other, more nuanced and mature avenues into the national story."

The paper has been on the racks for about two weeks and it has carried a mix of pieces so far.

One early story that caught my attention was a piece about prisoners in Abu Dhabi jails getting "five star" meals in a country where jail cells are stuffed beyond capacity.

There is the story about the UAE banning sales of "Grand Theft Auto IV" and piece on the ease an expat had in relocating his cat to Abu Dhabi.

There are more substantive pieces, such as the article by respected journalist Nicholas Blanford on Syrian soldiers joining militants at bases in eastern Lebanon.

But, as the US State Department notes, there is a great deal of self-censorship in the UAE, and press freedom only goes so far.

"We are here to produce a professional, commercially viable newspaper," Newland wrote in his note. "Press freedom is a by-product of this. The more we zero in on templated 'red line' stories at the expense of human interest and the ordinary narrative of life in the UAE, the more we look like a foreign newspaper, peering into the goldfish bowl…"