Al Jazeera’s Digital Leadership Mohammed Mukhtar Al Khalil
Introduction In May 2000, when we invited a group of journalists to establish a news website for Al Jazeera, it was a ground-breaking experience that produced a new digital journalism by all standards. It was an entirely new way of reporting on the region – one that was enhanced by where and how we covered the stories. This was the start of a transition from a limited range of broadcast and reporting abilities, to a much bigger uni- verse with various digital platforms. This pushed the network early on, to adopt a globalised direction that expanded its reach around the world. This was the authentic direction of the network, which at the time only possessed one Arabic-language news channel. In the following paragraphs, it will become clear that the network built its strategy on digitisation, even before its televised broadcasts; and this manifested in all its new channels, especially the English network which launched its website in 2003, three years before its first broadcast in 2006. Al Jazeera did not begin as a digital media company in the tra- ditional sense. Rather, it began as a linear television broadcaster that operated using digital methods to transmit its content via satellite net- works and digital cable systems. This digital work replaced traditional broadcast methods that did not go beyond local, ground line output. When satellite television coverage became more expansive, it was a digital transformation in the context of television broadcasts. The inter- net was a revolution in digitisation, transforming it to a new concept, one with broad expansion in a new world that previously had only a limited opportunity for the digitisation of television.
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