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Broken New: Al Jazeera America to shut down
It is being reported [washingtonpost.com] that Al Jazeera America will go off the Air. The Qatari backers knew that it would take ample distribution, lots of promotion, and audience goodwill to establish a foothold.
On Wednesday, Al Jazeera America’s owners acknowledged they had achieved none of those things. In an unexpected move that surprised even its journalists, the network’s Qatar-based parent said it would pull the plug on April 30, shutting down the channel less than three years after it started.
It wasn't a bad news network. It won journalism awards, and the slant was not dramatically obvious unlike some of its american competitors. Other international networks, AL Jazeera America, BBC America, and the Canadian CBC, were reasonably widely carried on US cable networks. All three were on my list of stations to check in on when ever international issues were breaking, just to get a non-US point of view. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the content and presentation.
AL Jazeera America reached some 61,513,000 homes, or about 52.8% of cable viewers. That put them at a disadvantage compared to Fox News 74.8% and CNN's 82.7%.
That fact, and its Aribic scripted logo and its very name put it behind the other big names right from the start as far as american audiences were concerned. And that start wasn't that auspicious either:
The channel is part of a media empire owned primarily by the royal family of Qatar, a Persian Gulf state that is rich in oil and natural gas. It began after its parent company paid $500 million in early 2013 to buy Current TV, a struggling cable channel founded by former vice president Al Gore.
