Al Jazeera launches English language news service.....

[Al-khiyal]

[Al-khiyal]

Al Jazeera - The Stream

[Al-khiyal]

Al Jazeera English plans show centered on social networking

March 6, 2011 -- As the Arab world reels with revolutions fomented in part online, Al Jazeera English is planning a new talk show that has social networking at its heart. It’s just lucky timing, says Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, the voluble young producer and co-host of the show called “The Stream” which is scheduled to appear on the English language version of Al Jazeera starting in May. The video above is a teaser for the show, which has been in the works since late last year. But as Africa and the Middle East see revolutions organized in part via Facebook (and dating sites) and publicized via Twitter and YouTube, the concept looks prescient.

The core idea of “The Stream” is that it’s not scripted in the ordinary way. Rather than give the hosts a script, typed rundown, or teleprompter cues, the producers will make extensive use of tweets, Facebook wall posts, and YouTube videos from their most engaged viewers and the web at large. That’s not to say it will be crowdsourced — producers are still making decisions about what topics to cover — but it will be deeply informed by an ongoing conversation with its viewers online. “Inherently it is a show that would not exist without these kinds of users,” says Shihab-Eldin.

They’re even considering “scripting” the show with Storify, a utility that makes it easy to assemble tweets into narratives. The idea is to reach a younger, more plugged-in audience than most news talk shows. That audience is sophisticated about social networking tools, however, and can quickly detect if Twitter updates (for instance) are merely being used as window-dressing for more traditional news approaches. Instead, “The Stream” aims to be a show that is born out of online activity. In addition to its website, the show has a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a collection of Storify-based news stories. And while the show is just half an hour a day, the producers expect their online channels to be active around the clock online. In other words, the talk show is a focal point for a 24/7 online community, rather than making the website a merely promotional vehicle for the show.

During the course of the show, they’ll read tweets and updates (and display them on-screen) as they come up. They’re also planning on interviewing guests via Skype — connection quality issues be damned. In a screen test we saw at the Wired offices recently, the hosts bantered with each other and with in-studio guests, but also responded to viewers’ @ replies, played YouTube videos, and Skyped with social media mavens around the world. The studio was liberally sprinkled with monitors, and the show frequently cut to fullscreen tweets while the hosts read the 140-character updates out loud, hash tags and all. “We’re very much going to be relying on what people are talking about,” says Shihab-Eldin.

“The Stream” will hit the airwaves just as its parent network sees a remarkable surge of interest online, particularly in America. Al Jazeera has seen a 2,500% increase in web traffic in recent weeks, 60% of which is coming from the U.S. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a fan of the network, which she says offers “real news, instead of a million commercials and arguments between talking heads.” And as it has grown, Al Jazeera has proven savvy about embracing the kinds of grass-roots, new-media news production that “The Stream” centers on. Indeed, the producers of the show see it as a kind of test bed for the integration of video and online — and if it works, they hope their techniques will be adopted throughout the network. “We’d kind of secretly love to be outdated in a year,” says Ben Connors, the show’s creative strategist and web guy.

Al Jazeera is not the only network to capitalize on social media: CNN displays tweets and YouTube videos too. But “The Stream”, by putting social networking at its core, is aiming for a different way of making the news — and a different purpose. “The democratization of the Arab world is directly related to the democratization of the media,” says Shihab-Eldin in the Storyboard podcast above(within link). “It’s not just about organizing protests … there are so many different ways in which social media is used to connect people across borders, but also to connect old media with new media, to fight the battle, to fight oppression.” That’s the world that “The Stream” wants to flow through. When the show starts in a few months, we’ll be able to see if it lives up to the promise.

[Al-khiyal]

Al Jazeera English:
Not just for Cantabrigians

April 3, 2011 -- While many Americans are flocking to Al Jazeera English to get a different account of the tumult in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, most of these viewers have to go online to do so. While Cambridge Community Television, to its credit, recently announced that it will begin airing an hour-long news broadcast from Al Jazeera English on weeknights, the network isn’t offered by the vast majority of American cable carriers. It’s time for this to change. One reason cable companies have been shy about carrying the channel is that its parent, the Qatar-based Arabic-language network Al Jazeera, has had a touchy relationship with the U.S. government. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the station’s coverage of the war in Iraq “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable,’’ while the network blamed the American military for intentionally targeting journalists after a 2003 strike on a Baghdad hotel killed an Al Jazeera correspondent. But this relationship has softened under President Obama, and last month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded the network for its coverage during a Senate committee hearing. Clinton is right: Through its coverage of recent unrest in Arab countries, and through its efforts to hire veteran correspondents from mainstream American and British news organizations, Al Jazeera has shown that it intends to be a vital source of news from a pivotal region of the world. Yes, the network has a point of view — its coverage tends to be skeptical both of non-democratic rulers in the Middle East and North Africa, and of American involvement in the region. But many Americans share this same viewpoint, and even for those who don’t the network can be deeply informative. As premium cable packages run into the hundreds of channels, including stations devoted narrowly to soccer, animal shows, or jewelry, there’s surely room for Al Jazeera English. Cable viewers in Cambridge won’t have to go to YouTube or the Al Jazeera website to see the channel (for an hour a night, at least). Other Americans deserve the same opportunity.