EmailI can't complain.
When Al Jazeera bought Current TV to turn it into Al Jazeera America, a 24-hour news channel, I thought it had interesting potential. Potential, it turns out is all it had.
At 2PM today, NY time, the company informed all employees that it was terminating its US news operations, both cable and digital effective April this year.
Glen Greenwald broke the story only a few minutes ago on his website, The Intercept.
It's no surprise to me, or anyone in the business. Their operations have been a mess for years - this was no secret in the TV news world. But worse, all they did was create a weak version of MSNBC or CNN. They had the chance to do something really different, but they could not bring themselves to depart from tried and true (and tired and old and frankly largely unwatchable) cable TV news formats.
Too bad.
You get your shot. You get a window of opportunity and you blow it.
It's over.
Truth be told, I had a few meetings with them where I tried to explain the enormous potential of iPhone video - of a world filled with 3.5 billion smart phones capable of capturing news and images from anywhere in the world and transmitting them instantly; of the potential of Citizen Journalism; of a chance to create a kind of Facebook for news and journalism.
"Interesting. Thanks but no thanks."
So bye bye Al Jaz.
Too bad.
Next!
Featured Courses
Recent Posts
The Future of News is NOT TikTok, It’s Netflix
December 18, 2024
Character-driven journalism is not new to newspapers, though it once was. It was once called The New Journalism in the 1960s — see Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe. Today it is industry standard. Why not take the Sopranos or Breaking Bad formula and marry it to TV journalism? (How many interviews have you seen in The Sopranos? How many Man on the Street soundbites have you seen in Breaking Bad?)
Good News is actually Good News
October 14, 2024
In a recent study by The Reuters Institute, 40% of Americans no longer watch or read the news at all. They find it too depressing. All doom and gloom.
The Future of News: TikTok or Netflix
September 09, 2024
There is a great deal of concern, well placed, that few people under the age of 30 watch TV news. Viewership of TV news in general has fallen off, so naturally, TV executives across the boards are searching for a solution. How to appeal to a demographic that spends most of their time on social media?