Online Hafi is an independent online journal about Abu Dhabi’s public transport, sightseeing coaches and city walking. We do not sell tickets, we do not take bookings, and we do not accept paid placements. What follows is the long version of who we are and how we work.
The journal began in 2019 as a private newsletter circulated between three friends who had been comparing notes on the Corniche bus on Friday afternoons. One of us was working as a sub-editor at a now-defunct city culture quarterly; another had spent four years at the photographic archive of a national museum; the third was a transport planner with an unusually patient temperament. We started writing route reviews because nothing of the kind seemed to exist for Abu Dhabi — every search result was either a booking page, a comparison engine, or a thinly-rewritten summary of a tourism-board press release. We wanted to read about the city the way we wanted to read about any other place we cared about: in long sentences, with the names of streets, with the time-stamp of the actual bus we had taken, with mistakes admitted and corrected.
The first issue was eight pages, photocopied at a print shop on Hamdan Street and posted to seventy-three subscribers. The second issue had two hundred and forty subscribers. By the end of the first year we had moved online, kept the print quarterly as a side-project, and were reaching readers in Sharjah, Dubai, Al Ain and a surprising number of cities outside the Gulf — Manchester, Lyon, Hyderabad, Toronto, Łódź. The newsletter remained free, by deliberate decision; the print issue was, and remains, sold by subscription only, at a price that does not quite cover production.
Our mission, in plain English, is to publish careful, slow, honest writing about Abu Dhabi’s public space. Public space, for us, includes the bus, the bus stop, the pavement, the seafront promenade, the courtyard of a museum, the public side of a beach. We publish field-tested route reviews, walking guides, reader letters, and the occasional historical piece on the city’s twentieth-century planning. We do not publish hotel reviews, restaurant rankings, or anything that could be mistaken for a booking page.
We are deliberately a small operation. The editorial desk is three people, with a rotating roster of two contributing writers — both Abu Dhabi residents — and a copy-editor based in Manchester. Photography is a mixture of original commissioned work and Creative-Commons-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons; we credit photographers in the captions and on a dedicated credits page in the print quarterly.
A route review begins with a ride. The writer gets on at the published first stop of the line, sits on the lower deck for the air-conditioning if it is summer or on the upper deck if it is winter, and writes by hand for the duration of the ride. We do not record audio or take video. We do not interview anyone we have not first spoken to without a notebook in front of them. After the ride, the writer transcribes the notes, fact-checks the timetable against the local Department of Municipalities feed, and writes a first draft within forty-eight hours.
The first draft goes to the copy-editor, who sends back queries, then to a second reader on the editorial desk, then to a final structural pass. We re-ride the route between the second and third draft if we have any uncertainty about timing or stop names. The final piece is published when, and only when, the editorial desk agrees that nothing in it is going to mislead a reader. In 7 years of operation we have issued seventeen public corrections, all of them archived on the journal’s website and acknowledged in the following dispatch.
We are not a booking site. We do not sell tickets, transit cards, tours, hotel rooms, restaurant reservations, airport transfers, theatre seats, or any other commercial product. We do not accept advertising on the website or in the newsletter. We do not run affiliate links, we do not place sponsored content, we do not host paid native advertising, and we do not enter into any commercial relationship that would compromise the editorial independence of the journal.
We are also not a tourism board. Several pieces over the years have been mildly critical of choices made by city authorities, particularly around bus-stop shading and the loss of certain public benches near the older corner of Mina Zayed. We continue to write what we observe.
The journal is funded almost entirely by reader subscriptions to the print quarterly. A small, stable percentage comes from a research-and-archive grant administered by an independent regional foundation, the terms of which prohibit any influence on editorial direction. We publish a brief annual statement of accounts on the website, signed by the editor-in-chief, and we are happy to answer detailed questions from readers about how the journal operates financially.
The editorial desk works out of a small office on the fourteenth floor of Al Maqam Tower, on Al Maryah Island, in the financial free-zone of Abu Dhabi. The address is given in full in the footer of every page. We are reachable by e-mail at any time and by telephone during the working week between 09:00 and 17:00 Gulf Standard Time. We answer reader letters individually; the only correspondence we publish is the one we have explicit permission to print.
Hafilat is the local transit card. It is also, more loosely, what the city’s residents will call any decent bus. We chose the shortened form, Hafi, because it sounded warmer in the mouth, and because we wanted a name that did not commit us to a particular idiom. Online Hafi was meant to be a placeholder. Five years on, it has not been replaced — and at this point, the readers will not let us.
Where a photograph in the journal is not original to the editorial desk, it is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence from Wikimedia Commons or a comparable open archive. The photographer is named in the caption on the article page and in the credits at the back of the print quarterly. If you are a photographer and you have noticed your work used in a way you would prefer to revise, please write to us at the editorial e-mail address; we will respond within two working days.
We started this journal because we wanted to read it. We continue, five years on, because hundreds of you wrote to say you were reading it too. Thank you for that — the cardamom-coffee thermos is, in a small but real way, paid for by your attention.