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Al-Jazeera planning channel in English

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite station denounced and bombed by the US and banned by the Iraqi government, has begun recruiting staff for a channel in English that will show news and documentaries.

"The brief is emphatically not to do an English translation of the Arabic channel," said Nigel Parsons, the project manager. "It will have international appeal and fill a lot of gaps in existing output."

The original Arabic news channel, established in 1996 and funded by the emir of Qatar, not only bucked the trend towards frivolity and light entertainment but broke many taboos, interviewing Israeli politicians and allowing debate of a kind rarely seen on Arab television.

It began to attract worldwide attention during the Afghan war in 2001 as the only station with a round-the-clock satellite link from Kabul to the outside world -- though as the fighting closed in on the city two American "smart" bombs hit its office under suspicious circumstances.

Further publicity came in the form of taped messages from Osama bin Laden. The broadcasting of these, together with the channel's coverage of Iraq, brought notoriety in the US.

Parsons believes that, in terms of brand awareness, al-Jazeera is now one of the three top names -- along with CNN and the BBC -- in the world of TV news.

"It's a huge plus to have an existing brand to launch off the back of," he said -- though he acknowledged that there are also minuses.

One big question is how many viewers and potential advertisers will be put off by the complaints heaped on al-Jazeera by the Bush administration.

"One of the aims of the English channel will be to try and bring better understanding of each other's positions," Parsons said. "We're not going to be a strident, one-sided channel. We'll aim for balance."

This could also improve the Arabic channel by serving as a teaching model, said Abdallah Schleifer of the Adham Center for Television Journalism in Cairo.

"If done right, and I think it's going to be done right, this could be a great boost to al-Jazeera itself because it could establish their credibility in certain areas where it's a bit speckled," he said.

The English channel's target audience is worldwide -- "not just Muslims who don't speak Arabic," Parsons said. "I think we might have a ready audience there, but it is not going to be an anti-Western or anti-American channel. Absolutely not."

The aim will be to fill a gap in the market vacated by other channels.

"If you take CNN, in the [United] States, they have been dragged to the right by Fox. Internationally, they definitely had a bad war in the Gulf. They have lost some credibility on the international stage.

"Where the BBC would come into the equation is that there has been a definite retreat ... on the news channels. Levels of coverage of the developing world are 40 percent of what they were when Michael Buerk first did the Ethiopian famine."

The main reason for this gap is expense, but Parsons hopes to fill it by sharing some resources with the Arabic channel and "being creative and outsourcing". He won't talk about the budget, which has yet to be agreed with the emir. However, he insisted: "We don't have an open check book."

Parsons, who was formerly sales director of APTN, the television arm of the Associated Press news agency, has instructions to generate revenue streams for the English channel.

"They [the Qatar government] do want it to be a commercial channel, if possible, but I doubt if we'll go for the pay-TV model," he said.

The former chief of the UK's Independent Television News channel, Stuart Purvis, is skeptical about the channel's prospects.

"There's no profit to be made in this kind of enterprise ... only losses," he said, adding that even a successful channel such as Sky News loses up to ?15 million a year.
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