The news channel hasn’t done much to drum up interest in advance of its launch. Al Jazeera America sets own course

Weeks ahead of its debut, Al Jazeera America is doing things the old-fashioned way.

AJAM, as it’s referred to by staff, is investing heavily in investigative journalism. It is opening bureaus in cities across the country. It is hiring executives and on-air talent from across the major news networks. It is vowing to eschew partisanship and ideology in favor of serious, hard-hitting impact stories that matter to Americans and that the rest of the cable news media refuses — or can’t afford — to cover.


The problem is it’s not clear that anyone will watch.

“This is an age of celebrity journalism, … of talking heads and opinion,” said Lawrence Pintak, a former Middle East correspondent for CBS News and founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. “Al Jazeera America is positioning itself as a news channel, but the cable news audience is tiny to begin with.”

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The news channel also hasn’t done much to drum up interest in advance of the Aug. 20 launch — beyond a few press releases, there’s been scant promotion; an executive management team has only recently been brought on; and the on-air hires aren’t exactly households names to most Americans.

Today, the big-three cable news channels dedicate more airtime to opinion and analysis than they do to newsgathering. Fox News set the gold standard for heavily opinionated infotainment 17 years ago, and MSNBC has been following suit since 2007. Even CNN, which came to fame on its reporting on the first Gulf War, now spends as much time consulting partisan contributors as it does hearing from its own reporters.

Al Jazeera America doesn’t want to compete with that. Instead, the Qatari-owned network wants to do what CNN used to do: broadcast nonpartisan, boots-on-the-ground reporting from cities and towns across the country and all points across the globe twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. AJAM has announced a 16-team investigative unit and 12 bureaus across the country, in currently undercovered cities, like Seattle, Nashville, New Orleans and Detroit, as well as major markets, like New York (where it is based), Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.

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“We are going to be committed to covering news that comes from all over the United States in ways that our competitors can’t do at this point,” Kate O’Brian, the former ABC News executive who is newly named president of AJAM, told POLITICO. “And Al Jazeera is able to cover international stories better than others because of all the resources we have around the world through Al Jazeera English,” the company’s existing English-language network.

But Al Jazeera has yet to prove that the appetite for a straightforward newsgathering channel actually exists in the United States. When asked for evidence that it does, proponents will cite the spike in viewership during Al Jazeera English’s livestream coverage of the 2011 Arab Spring, which could be viewed for free online. But those numbers subsided as quickly as they spiked.

Meanwhile, the relatively infinitesimal demand for channels like BBC and CNN International, which Al Jazeera is likely to emulate — albeit with far more domestic coverage — suggests that Americans are content without such a channel. CNN’s own tack away from the traditional newsgathering model provides further cause for doubt.

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“If it’s just going to be a conventional news channel, there is not a market for that. What Al Jazeera America has to do is decide what’s going to make it unique,” said Philip Seib, the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect” and director of the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy.

David Marash, Al Jazeera English’s former Washington anchor, said that AJAM can’t rely on courting existing cable news viewers — most of whom are above the age of 60 — but would instead have to find and cultivate a new audience, much the way Fox News did in 1996.

“Like Fox, they’re going to have to try to create an audience — an audience of younger people who are obviously less conservative than the Fox audience,” Marash said. Though such an audience would be “trained to get their information on the Internet,” Marash said there was plenty of data to suggest that digital-first consumers will continue to supplement their media diet with television programming.

If any channel can afford to test the demand for an old-fashioned news channel, it’s AJAM, which is backed by the deep pockets of the Qatari royal family.

“Al Jazeera has virtually unlimited funding, and the feeling of the people in Qatar is that to be a true player in global journalism, you need to have a footprint in the United States,” Seib explained. “Despite what they may say, there is no expectation that they’re going to make a profit. They just want to be noticed.”

If the audience for a channel like Al Jazeera America does exist, AJAM so far has done little to court it.

“I’m sitting in Pullman, Wash., right now, staring at corn fields. Nothing they’ve done so far is going to reach out to the people out there,” Pintak said. “The media cognoscenti are going to turn it on, but most people won’t know it exists.”

“My guess is once they have a product on the air, they’ll become more aggressive in terms of public relations and advertising,” Marash said. “But in some ways, that makes perfect sense: Why flog something that people can’t see yet?”

The majority of the rollout has consisted of a slow trickle of press releases announcing anchors and correspondents that few folks outside the industry will be familiar with.

To wit, Joie Chen, a former CNN anchor who hasn’t been on television in five years, will host the network’s flagship primetime show, “America Tonight.” Antonio Mora, a former “Good Morning America” correspondent who has since gone into local television, will host the network’s nightly talk-show, while former CNN correspondent Ali Velshi will anchor a finance program. Correspondents include former broadcast veterans like Michael Viqueira of NBC and Sheila MacVicar of CBS. Most of the on-air talent comes out of local news.

The one name Americans might recognize is Soledad O’Brien, the former CNN morning anchor who has agreed to produce documentaries for the network and will serve as a special correspondent for “America Tonight.” But even then, O’Brien is not exclusive to Al Jazeera, and she will continue to produce documentaries for other networks.

Ehab Al Shihabi, the interim CEO of Al Jazeera America, said AJAM’s philosophy was “a little bit different” than that other news organizations when it came to on-air talent.

“Here, content is king,” he said. “It’s about what the talent has rather than how famous that talent is. … We are serious news; we are not infotainment.”

Marash similarly described Al Jazeera as an organization that is more like a wire service than a platform for big personalities.

“Their emphasis has never been what we in the business call ‘one names,’ like Peter, Dan, Brian or Katie,” Marash said, referring to the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings; former CBS News anchor Dan Rather; NBC News anchor Brian Williams; and Katie Couric, who has worked for all three of the major broadcast news organizations.

“They’ve hired a lot of good people; they’re all very solid journalists. But they are hiring people who are known in the business to be high quality but not big celebrity names,” he said. “They’re more worker bees than show horses.”

Ultimately, that could prove to be the added-value Al Jazeera America provides in a market that has become saturated with talking heads. Like the CNN of old, AJAM could become the network that television news consumers turn to when they actually want news.

AJAM could also attract Americans with its emphasis on regional coverage. In Detroit, AJAM is expected to offer in-depth reporting on the auto industry and the city’s bankruptcy woes; from New Orleans, it will offer comprehensive coverage of hurricane season and the ongoing fallout from the Gulf oil spill; in Seattle and San Francisco, it will cover the latest developments in the technology and green energy industries.

Though skeptical, both Seib and Pintak don’t dismiss that the market for such a channel might exist.

“I was giving a radio interview once, and a man from Mississippi called and said, ‘I just want you to know that Al Jazeera English has done the best job covering the corporations involved with the Gulf oil spill,’” Seib said. “If Al Jazeera America can be a populist, investigative news organization for the people of the United States — well, there might be a market for that.”

“Maybe Jazeera will surprise everybody,” Pintak said. “Maybe we will learn that cable news has been underestimating the viewer.”