By Azmat KhanWhen Al Jazeera announced it would be launching an American news network in early 2013, many journalists believed it could be a game changer – myself included.
During the Arab Spring, its English channel’s live stream had drawn millions of first-time viewers in the United States. To those watching, the coverage was refreshingly bold, the reporters fierce, and the mission – to give voice to the voiceless – exhilarating. Even after Egypt’s protests ended, Americans continued to watch and read Al Jazeera online. The fact that it had attracted a growing digital audience seemed to challenge prevailing beliefs about journalism, particularly the idea that there’s little American appetite for international reporting, let alone international reporting that isn’t dumbed down. For many Americans, not just journalists, Al Jazeera was a hopeful path for the future of news.
Only three years later, hardly anyone is surprised that Al Jazeera America will be closing shop in April, least of all its original fan base.
People have argued that AJAM was too “foreign,” too serious, or too toxic a work environment to ever really succeed, and that oil prices and a litany of lawsuits made it financially unviable. But from my experience working there, it was digital naïveté that doomed it more than anything else.
Take a moment and imagine what AJAM could have been if Al Jazeera had spent $2.5 billion on an experimental digital media enterprise – not a cable news channel.
Now consider what it actually did: Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s already struggling Current TV for half a billion dollars, and then spent an estimated 2 billion more running it and trying to keep cable affiliates from dropping it. The latter cost more than money. It required AJAM to compromise its brand: scaling back global reporting in favor of domestic coverage and consenting to the draconian online restrictions of cable affiliates. Wary of free content, affiliates like Time Warner refused to carry the new network unless Al Jazeera slashed its most ambitious and innovative digital offerings, including the global live stream that made Al Jazeera’s name in America. Stunningly, every single AJAM video published online had to be taken down within a week, disappearing from the internet as though it never existed. But the restrictions did more than limit access; they stifled innovation. Amid the resurgence of podcasts, most audio was a no-go, as was video animation. Despite immense outcry from its own staff, Al Jazeera caved time and again.
Rather than dedicating the brunt of its resources to figuring out a new model in journalism’s changing landscape, it sunk most of its money, reputation, and staff into an old one. For a news organization that made its name in America streaming innovative global coverage, it was a stunning miscalculation – one rooted in AJAM’s original conception as a cable channel and then exacerbated by other blunders.
Most news organizations build their base first, testing models before growing rapidly, but AJAM did the reverse. Scaling up rapidly – hiring more than 700 staff mere months ahead of its expected launch – led to chaos, poor management, and some bad hires. The company’s CEO was widely reviled by staff as a bully with poor vision. Before it even launched, the channel was the target of sustained bigotry and anti-Muslim sentiment. It launched to disappointing ratings that improved only little over time. Across AJAM, morale was low, and issues of workplace harassment, sexism, and racism that in my experience are pervasive across most media organizations quickly bubbled to the surface in the form of lawsuits.
Against these extraordinary restraints, AJAM’s talented broadcast and digital journalists managed to produce impressive award-winning work that often epitomized its “voice of the voiceless” mission. AJAM won two OPC awards last year: the David Kaplan Award for a report on Gaza and the Joe and Laurie Dine Award for work that detailed the exploitation of contract workers on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan.
Dedicating reporters to tribal reservations across the country, AJAM covered Native American issues better than any other news organization. It delved deeply into the hard realities of Americans living in poverty, new frontiers in LGBTQ rights, and the lives of people with disabilities. Its coverage found few viewers on TV, but its multimedia and long form thrived online, in spite of digital restrictions.
It would be a mistake to think the lesson in AJAM’s end is that serious, smart coverage like this, or a brand associated with Al Jazeera, could never find an audience in America. Its most promising audience always lay in the digital sphere.
As an example, consider the success of AJ+, Al Jazeera’s San Francisco-based experiment in digital video. It differs vastly from AJAM in form and innovation, but shares its “foreignness” and probing style. And yet AJ+ videos have been wildly popular on the platform where more Americans get their news than any other: Facebook.
A lean San Francisco-based staff of 70 experiment with distributed content: material it only publishes on social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Tailored to how people consume news on their phones, its videos are often snappy and can be watched without sound. Within a year of launching, AJ+ videos were the second most watched of any news publisher on Facebook and generated 2.2 billion views there in 2015 alone.
Early on, AJ+ videos were primarily explainers, but over time, they broke into original foreign reporting. Its staff traveled to Europe to journey alongside migrants seeking refuge, and to the forests of Guerrero state in Mexico, where 43 students disappeared in 2014.
But AJ+ isn’t perfect or a miraculous solution to journalism’s crises. Sometimes its experiments have felt cheesy or partisan. And like other media organizations producing distributed content, it doesn’t offer a very viable profit model – yet. But it’s prioritizing what media organizations that want to succeed need to: experimentation and innovation.
AJAM’s closure shouldn’t dissuade the media and its consumers of their hopes for the future of journalism; it should better inform their attempts create the one they want.
Azmat Khan was a digital reporter at Al Jazeera America in 2013 and 2014. She is now an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News. She is a member of the OPC’s board of governors.