In the rapid-fire give-and-take, one correspondent was pegged to be in Monrovia by Saturday, and there was the immediate need to find a guest to round out a package on gem mining in Burma, someone who could talk about the corrupt ruling junta of generals, a task left to a young American from Utah named Devin Greenleaf. Allan was convinced that southern Sudan might "go off the rails" again. "Send Yvonne off leave or Andrew if his shoulder surgery has healed, but we need to launch quickly."

And then there was the damn royal wedding, and England’s ambivalence about it. Allan couldn’t work up the excitement, muttered aloud that there were too many people out on maternity leave at the office to keep up. "Everyone knocking up the missus," quipped Harrison, who then leapt the Atlantic: "Just so you all know, Latin America feels like it’s not getting the love with all of this Libya. What’s driving them crazy is that we ask for a package and then don’t use it."

In many ways, the gathering resembled the kind of story meetings you might find at any network in New York, Atlanta, or London, the only difference being that the conversation seemed to include the deeper kneading of oft-overlooked regions, in part a result of Al Jazeera’s recent expansion from over seventy bureaus to a projected eighty by next year. What increasingly differentiated AJE from the pack was its reach, its ability to gather input from Juba to Port-au-Prince, from Harare to Toronto—and its willingness to settle early in a country, with indigenous talent, and begin trying to read the tea leaves.

Soon, a packet went around itemizing about seventy potential stories that AJE was working on, from global arms dealing (in which, yet again, the U.S. had been identified by a Swedish report as one of the top suppliers) to aboriginal youth unemployment in Australia, from rhino poaching in South Africa to an upcoming protest in Lebanon. Allan paused over the last, asking a few questions. "It’s not Egypt...yet," she said. "Why don’t we bring in the truck for that one," she said. "Just in case something goes off there."

From Doha, I pushed on to Cairo, with plans to join Ayman Mohyeldin. My travel day happened to coincide with the arrival of fresh AJE teams, descending on the city to use the bureau as a way station before leaving for Libya. In the line at passport control, I met up with one of AJE’s true stars, correspondent James Bays, his booming baritone slipping to sotto voce, advising me not to mention the name Al Jazeera nor act as though we knew each other. "We’ve been banned here, mate," he said.

And it wasn’t just Egypt. What was surprising—and what might have been a mark of Al Jazeera’s real credibility—was the list of countries in which the network has been banned: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen, among about a dozen. In fact, there was an unconfirmed rumor coming out of Libya now that Qaddafi had announced a million-dollar bounty on all Al Jazeera reporters, something that Bays shrugged off, but not without expressing concern for his colleagues already on the front line. "It’s very, very dicey at the moment," he said.

The next day, I met Mohyeldin at a coffee shop near his apartment where the well-to-do take their caffeine. He was planted at an outdoor table, in a pale sun, wearing a brown leather jacket, dark shades, and rakish stubble (that hadn’t gone unnoticed by a nearby table of youngish women), in conversation with a heavier-set man, perhaps the most important—and most popular—of the blogging tweeters in the Mideast, an activist named Mahmoud Salem, who goes by the handle Sandmonkey. During the uprisings, it had been Sandmonkey and a small, active group of bleeters who’d helped connect the mobs and orchestrate crowd movements—and who tweeted out routes so that people could get home safely. In barrages of sometimes sixty to eighty missives a day, Sandmonkey told his followers how to counteract tear gas with Coca-Cola and how to elude Mubarak’s forces, while simultaneously keeping up an acerbic, at times funny commentary on events as momentum grew for Mubarak’s departure. Mohyeldin had been a habitué of Sandmonkey’s tweets, as a partial guide to the revolution, but this was their first time meeting face to face, and so they sat for the next couple of hours—Sandmonkey smoking luxuriously, sipping coffee; Mohyeldin casually working to evaluate and cultivate another potential contact.