Interview: Mohamed Nanabhay, Head Of New Media, Al Jazeera: Winning Over The Skeptics Online
This story was written by Robert Andrews.
Its English TV channel is still only carried by three local cable networks in the US despite growing acceptance in other countries - but an ambitious online strategy, coupled with web innovations added during Israel's bombardment of Gaza, is now helping Al Jazeera win over new audiences in America and around the world.
Denied conventional TV carriage, the Arab-centric news network has instead opted for what new media head Mohamed Nanabhay calls "distributed distribution" - syndicating online via YouTube, Real, Independent.co.uk, the LiveStation and Zattoo apps and a host of other outlets. These online video efforts, plus blow-by-blow reports posted to Twitter, produced a "huge spike in traffic" during Israel's month-long offensive in the Palestinian territory, when Al Jazeera was one of the few networks with cameras in the region.
"It's been quite a busy month ... our team is quite small ... everybody worked flat out during the war," said 29-year-old Nanabhay, speaking from the broadcaster's Doha, Qatar, headquarters, where a seven-strong online team focuses on web projects to spread Al Jazeera's content as widely as possible. "Since the war started, the amount of live stream viewers has increased by over 500 percent."
Along the way, this growing attention is convincing some cynics that Al Jazeera, despite post-9/11 criticisms for showing al Qaeda videos, is a credible news organization, Nanabhay says: "A lot of that was misperception from people who had never seen the channel, and was more political than anything else. Now we've been able to reach out to communities who may not have seen us previously. By and large, we've won over the skeptics"...
By Robert Andrews