By Paloma Haschke
Salah Negm, Al Jazeera English director of news
Salah Negm, veteran of the Al Jazeera’s Arabic network, was a news editor at the BBC’s Arabic television before he got appointed as AJE’s director of news in 2009. Yesterday at the channel’s headquarter, while the news hour was about to begin and between two editorial meetings, he sat down with the EU-NA fellows for a Q&A session.
Question: How could you define Al Jazeera’s editorial policy?
Salah Negm’s answer: We follow the British and the American ethical broadcasting codes. Our policy is to be ethically correct but not politically correct. We empower the people with knowledge. This is our job. We give them information.
You’ve worked at the BBC, what would you described as the main difference between the two networks?
Here we are free to be more experimental with the way we’re making the news. The network is ready to invest and to try new ideas whereas at the BBC, the network doesn’t want to take too many risks. It takes ages to implement new ideas. You have to pass through a security and then a legal process before anything gets approved. Assessing the risks takes at least three weeks. At Al Jazeera it is done within a day. This is why we’ve been the first channel to cover the events in Libya.
How can you explain the success of Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Arab spring?
We have a network of correspondents from different nationalities. It allows us to be well implanted in the region and on the local ground. We have also been very fast at integrating new media in our job both as a source of information and a way of broadcasting. We were the first channel to use an IP camera, this is how we’ve been able to cover Libya’s revolution from its early beginnings.
Could you talk more about covering the events in Syria?
Syria was a challenge. Three months ago, we got kicked out of the country. The two journalists we’ve sent there, one as an official reporter, the other with a touristic visa, got spotted and one of them was deported to Tehran because of his Iranian nationality. He was freed after three weeks of detention. The only way to cover Syria now is by using contents provided by local activists on the ground or independent producers willing to take the risk to report for us. We then have to verify the information they send us.
What about the resignation of Wadah Khanfar and its replacement by a member of the Qatari ruling family? Do you think Al Jazeera is going to lose its credibility?
The new managing director is a professional and the audience is the only judge. If the network loses its independence then its viewers will leave. Also, we are financed by the Qatari government and we don’t want to diversify our sources of funding. We don’t want to deal with advertisers that could add pressure on the editorial process.
How do you see the network evolve in the next years?
The future of media is online. We already have an online stream but in ten years reporting for Al Jazeera will require multimedia skills to produce not only video reports but packages of different supports. The network also has a Research and Development center and media training one to improve its strategy and competitiveness. Right now, we are focusing on the launching of three new channels in different languages: Turkish, Swahili, and Bosnian. The Al Jazeera network is also elaborating a rebranding strategy to modernize its image for the next ten years, but I can’t really talk about it.
Stay Connected