Al Anstey speaking at the press conference yesterday. PICTURE: Jayaram
By Joey Aguilar/Staff Reporter
Al Jazeera Media Network will be focusing more on its digital platform this year to reach many people across the world, Al Anstey, managing director of the English channel, said yesterday.
“We will soon launch a new version of our online portal, aljazeera.com, with “far richer and more dynamic content” to audiences, especially those who seek stories using smartphones and tablets,” he said.
“We achieved some notable progress in the past 12 months, resulting in month-on-month growth in our digital audiences. Our social following continues to climb,” Anstey claimed at a media briefing yesterday.
The new aljazeera.com pages will feature breaking news and extra in-depth material that tells that full story, giving the viewers the background and context.
Anstey said their content such as stories, photos, blogs and programmes will all be accessible online – optimised to fit electronic devices. It can also be easily shared on social media such as Twitter and
Facebook.
Al Jazeera currently has more than 5mn followers on Facebook and 2.25mn followers on
Twitter.
Using a smartphone, the broadcast station’s bureaus, correspondents, and producers will be able to send contents to the online portal faster.
“This is a huge opportunity for us to tell stories in many different ways. With a “multi-platform engaged community, Al Jazeera wants to reach more people from across the globe especially the young audiences who often get their information from social media or digital platform. Not necessarily from the TV set that we all know days past,” he added.
“Some parts of the world are mobile heavy, some parts are more on desktop which is more traditional,” Anstey pointed out. “We have to reach out to all the people who want to see our content, interact with our content at a time and place of their choosing, on a device they want to see us on.”
This year, the station will also launch a number of new programmes including a weekly show from Washington DC hosted by Mehdi Hasan. It will be the same “challenging style” of Head to Head show but in a new format.
In the next six months, Al Jazeera will also come up with an online show titled “Review” which will later be launched on TV.
Besides big coverages this year, the television station is mulling to open new bureaus in areas not traditionally covered.
Anstey said they are currently installing state-of-the-art technologies that will enable them, as an editorial team, to perform well.
“It enables us to do the job that we do as journalists with greater reason, greater functionality,” he explained. “But also it also enables us to collaborate with the other network channels from a technical perspective and from a collaborative editorial perspective to far greater extent.”
These technical changes, he added, will further improve the look and feel of the channels in the offering in the digital platforms.