The Morocco Mall south of Casablanca (promotional photo)

The Morocco Mall is the largest mall in Africa and it  was mobbed yesterday.  Open for just 2 months, this stylishly futuristic shopping center, a 20 minute drive down the coast from Casablanca,  is still something of a novelty.     Inside are hundreds of luxury stores, an IMAX movie theater, aquarium and a musical fountain.

Twelve American journalism students went to the Morocco Mall  to see if they could find a story.

How do journalists decide what to report about?  I get that question a lot and not just from students.  When they first walked into the Mall, the students didn’t see much that seemed like a story.  But remember, we’re in Morocco.

A story is something surprising and there’s a lot surprising here.  It is surprising to find this mall in a country with the widest income gap in the Arab world.  ” [The Morocco Mall]  is a stark symbol of the contrasts of a country with 8.5 million people in poverty that ranks 130 out of 186 on the UN’s human development index,” reports the Associated Press.  Which raises some interesting questions.

Souk in Marrakech. (Photo: Lonely Planet)

Are people mobbing the Morocco Mall just sightseers or are they buying things?  Who is the Mall’s  target customer (one has to wonder about shops selling skimpy bikinis in a country where many women are covered, some entirely)?   Is the Mall for Moroccans or for wealthy Arabs from the Gulf States (the Mall was half financed by the Saudi Al-Jedaie Group)?  Or is the Mall targeting Europeans, who make up the majority of Morocco’s tourists but who are reportedly traveling less, with their countries now in economic crisis?   Why would European tourists bother with familiar stores such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren, when Morocco’s amazing souks sell some of the world’s finest crafts from rugs to leather to ceramics?

In its story about the mall, The Miami Herald proclaimed, “So much for the souk.”

Not so fast!  We’ll see what twelve American journalism students find out.