Al Jazeera America Set For Tuesday’s Launch

Al Jazeera America CEO Eham Al Shihabi says news organizations today focus too much on what he calls the 10% — the politicians and the celebrities — and not enough on the 90%, the general public.

“We’re changing that model and focusing on the 90%,” the executive said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “We’re going to ask the 10% what they think about what the 90% is saying.”

Al Jazeera America (AJA), 850 employees strong, is set to go live on Tuesday at 3 p.m.

“We are absolutely ready for next week’s launch,” Shihabi says. “We’re not just ready, we’re more than ready.”

About 75% of those employees hold editorial or broadcast positions and are led by ABC News veteran Kate O’Brian, the network’s president, who says at launch, the network will air more than 14 hours of live news reported throughout the day or night.

“And that’s really day or night,” O’Brian says. “We’re going to be on 24/7, 365. We know people want to get their news whenever they have the opportunity to tune in and we will be there. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment for a new channel and I’m incredibly proud of it.”

AJA is headquartered in New York and will rely on local news bureaus in 12 U.S. cities to provide coverage that O’Brian says the other news networks aren’t offering.

“Our bureau staffs are going to be very busy covering a lot of different things, both important local stories — because we want to make we’re bringing those important local stories to a national audience — and also whip arounds,” she says. “There will be stories where, frankly, a lot of our competitors will do from Washington or New York that really have a resonance in other parts of the United States.”

The bureaus are located in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington. AJA will also rely on its nearly 70 overseas news bureaus for global stories that are part of the Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic networks.

O’Brian says while the American network’s main focus is on telling strong, unbiased stories about what’s going on in the United States, it’s not going to ignore major global stories like the Egyptian crackdown by security forces that has killed more than 500 people.

“We’re going to cover events that Americans are interested in,” O’Brian says, adding the network has been covering the events in Egypt and doing live shots for rehearsals.

At launch, AJA says it will have fewer commercials compared to other cable networks. The channel will air only six minutes of spots each hour, says Shihabi, who declined to share any of the channel’s sponsors.

And for the first few years, O’Brian says the channel won’t be concerned about ratings. “Our success is based on how well we tell the stories of news that’s important to the American audience. And doing that will create the impact. Doing that will actually get people talking about the channel and wanting the channel, and contacting their cable operating, asking where is that channel. That will be the success.”