FOR a country reputed to be dry and dull, Saudi Arabia is surprisingly awash with news. The good old broadsheet newspaper, dying out elsewhere, thrives. The kingdom boasts more than a dozen fiercely competing national dailies. The newest, called Mecca after the holy city where it is published, was launched this month.

Not so long ago it was rare to find the front page of a Saudi paper unadorned with a picture of His Majesty King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Places, or at least of some lesser prince with an equally quaint title. Now, in the year 1435 by the Muslim calendar, the chronicling of princely doings, though still de rigueur, tends to be relegated to the inside pages, above advertisements promising cheap, reliable Asian workers or promoting scientifically proven erectile enhancement.

What dominates the front pages now is actual news—especially, these days, the great dramas unfolding in places such as Syria and Iraq. But increasingly it is local human-interest stories that grab headlines. Recently they told the sad tale of six girls whose desert picnic near the capital, Riyadh, turned into tragedy when one of them slipped accidentally into a seasonal pool created by a winter rainstorm. One by one the others went in to save her, and one after another they were caught by quicksand and drowned.

There are happy stories, too, such as the tale of a good Saudi citizen in the city of Buraida. In stark contrast to the more commonly heard tales of domestic abuse and cruelty to servants, this man was a paragon of kindness. When his Indonesian driver of ten years’ standing got married, his master not only paid for a sumptuous wedding to which he invited the grandest notables of Buraida. He paid his servant a year’s wages in advance, and handed him the keys to his own car as a wedding gift.

Sometimes it is the brief little items that say the most about life in the kingdom. The fact that police in Riyadh recorded more than 2.5m traffic violations last year, a 14% rise on the year before, hints at either a surfeit of bad driving, or overzealous police, or both. The Arab News, one of two English-language dailies, noted that the Riyadh region registered a colossal 166,800 traffic accidents in 2012.

Al-Watan, a daily published in Abha, in the south-west, carried another revealing statistic. Only recently have unmarried adult women begun to plead before judges to be freed from the legal guardianship of their own fathers. In the past such an act would have been seen as inconceivably shameful to a family’s reputation. But according to the paper such cases now pop up at a rate of one a day.

Typically, says al-Watan, they come about when a divorced father seeks to spite his ex-wife by withholding his legally required approval of their daughter’s choice of husband, or when the father demands a gift from his prospective son-in-law, or even a proportion of his salary. In such cases, sharia courts can take the daughter’s side and declare the father incompetent to act as a guardian. The judge may order the marriage to proceed so that the bride can be legally secure under a new male guardian, her husband. This outcome is apparently now more common: in such ways, the kingdom progresses.

But in a place as politically restrictive as Saudi Arabia, people not surprisingly seek the hottest news beyond the reach of government censors. Relative wealth, added to the big surplus of free time that comes with youth unemployment reckoned to top 40%, has turned Saudis into some of the world’s most intensive users of social media. A recent case of child abuse was brought to light via YouTube. An outraged citizen uploaded footage from a security camera that showed a man fondling a young girl in the lobby of an apartment block. Following an outcry, newspapers later reported his arrest.

Similarly, the occasional arrest, trial or imprisonment of dissidents, be they religious extremists, alleged apostates or liberals demanding a constitutional monarchy, tend to surface on Twitter rather than in print. Saudi newspapers have shied, for instance, from reporting the return to active jihad of Ahmed al-Shayea, a would-be suicide bomber in Iraq who survived his mission with severe burns. On his return to Saudi Arabia in 2007 he publicly repented, warning his countrymen against al-Qaeda and its promises of noble martyrdom. Embarrassingly for the Saudi authorities, who put him through an expensive rehabilitation programme, he began tweeting in November from Syria, where he has joined the ranks of another branch of al-Qaeda.

It is Twitter, too, that exposes the fiercest quarrels in the persistent debate between conservatives and reformers. When a well-known activist for women’s rights, with a Twitter following of nearly 100,000, questioned whether Muslim men should refrain from shaving their beards in emulation of the Prophet Muhammad, a prominent sheikh tweeted back a severe rebuke. May her hands be paralysed, he cursed. And when another reformist launched a Twitter hashtag calling for the abolition of Saudi Arabia’s religious police, it was quickly swamped with tweets branding liberals as pigs and degenerates.