Al Jazeera America One Year Later: Is Gaza the Turning Point?
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As Al Jazeera America completes its first year on TV, it has some good news to celebrate. Prime-time audiences drawn to the network’s coverage of the Gaza conflict have leapt from an average of 15,000 in the week ending July 6 to 23,000 in the week ending Aug. 3.
That follows three straight quarters of household and audience growth, not to mention its strongest month yet for digital traffic in July and a growing body of awards for quality journalism, according to the network. “We have accomplished a lot,” Al Jazeera America CEO Ehab Al Shihabi told staff in a one-year-anniversary memo on Wednesday.
But twelve months into a mission to bring the U.S. “fact-based, in-depth coverage” of domestic and foreign news “without the punditry, opinion and ‘infotainment’ seen elsewhere,” as Mr. Al Shihabi’s memo put it, the network still works in margins of the program guide, little-seen by viewers and rarely bought by advertisers. And like other cable news networks that see audiences wax and wane as big news comes and goes, the big question is how much of its recent viewership bump Al Jazeera America can keep after open hostilities in Gaza subside.
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