If you're on the Al Jazeera America mailing list, you likely got this yesterday:
This is the final Al Jazeera America newsletter. Although we are no longer updating our website, today we launched a legacy page with the best journalism we have produced over the last two and a half years. We encourage you to continue to watch our channel on TV until April 12. And for the latest news please visit Al Jazeera English.
We've known about this since mid-January, but I'd like to say goodbye, on the occasion of the last update to the website.
I had long gone to the international Al Jazeera site for a global viewpoint. Al Jazeera America brought a clear eye to domestic issues. When other news outlets were obsessed with Football! or Oscars! or political horserace!, AJAM was writing about lack of police training in dealing with the mentally ill, or that that PTSD and depression is driving an epidemic of suicide among firefighters (to pick just two recent stories). If you read the Overnight News Digest diaries, you've seen AJAM stories there frequently.
AJAM is closing for financial reasons:
Great journalism doesn’t always draw a big audience. That’s what happened here at Al Jazeera America (AJAM), where superb reporting, bolstered by a first-rate opinion section, found a following, just not one big enough to interest major advertisers.
-- David Cay Johnston, The way news should be done
Independent news organizations are hurting across the board. The problem is not a bad economy, it's not the 1%...it's the Internet that's the culprit, and our penchant for free content. We've gotten used to advertiser-supported, non-subscription content -- we watch shows on YouTube, we read our monthly allotment of free NYT articles, we ignore content behind paywalls, or look for someone to copy it out and repost it. But purely ad supported content isn't paying the bills for real journalism. So what we get instead is infotainment, scandal, shock-value -- we get what sells ads.
AJAM had an additional burden -- Islamophobia. Cable companies were slow to accept the AJAM channel, and, I suspect, some advertisers and readers were likewise standoffish.
Over the past week, AJAM has posted articles on the state of journalism today by many of their writers. I'd like to point to some of them, with a few quotes, and encourage you to go read them on the AJAM web site, to give them a few last advertising views. I'll start with a bit more from David Cay Johnston's article.
The quality of American journalism today is nothing like what was during the last third of the 20th century. Then news organizations earned big profits, and the best of them poured enormous amounts of money into finding, developing and sending into the field thousands of journalists. To be sure, it wasn’t perfection. There were flaws aplenty, especially regarding the lingering effects of America’s original sin of slavery and the institutional racism that persists long after the Civil War. …
AJAM produced great journalism because it was never caught up in access journalism, in which what producers call the get matters more than the story. “The get” refers to securing a politician or other figure big in the news to appear on a show or sit for an interview. The problem with this approach is that to ensure future gets, the guests are typically asked softball questions and showered with flattery.
And here, Chris Lehmann rips modern media a new one -- these are a few polite parts, but you should go read the full rant.
Amid all this glum news about the news business, it’s easy to overlook a no-less-alarming trend: the ways in which the news operations surviving the wretched digital-age shakeout are effectively adapting to new market conditions. These ambitious shops are steadily blurring the protocols of honest newsgathering and the considerably sneakier ones of data-driven commerce to the point of functional identicality. …
The polite euphemism for such rampant self-prostitution in our brave new digital media world is “sponsored content” — i.e., writing that’s made to look, feel and read like actual journalism while promoting a paid-for commercial agenda.
-- Chris Lehmann, Journalism crisis leads to shameful compromises
In their own goodbye article, AJAM highlights their committment to diversity, to covering the powerless, to highlighting the forgotten.
The core principle driving the journalism that distinguished Al Jazeera America online as a unique voice in a cluttered news landscape was the simple — yet radical — proposition that no single human life is worth less than any other.
Whether it was Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, teenage African-Americans killed in their prime; Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach; Palestinian baby Ali Dawabshe, who died in the flames of his firebombed home in a village under Israeli occupation; Nicaraguan peasant farmer Carlos Wilson Bilis contemplating the destruction of his livelihood by an epic canal project; or LeeAnne Walters raising the alarm over the poisoned water pouring from the taps in Flint, Michigan, their stories deserved to be told. Their names needed to be known and their voices heard. Their plight, like those of so many hundreds featured in our coverage, revealed the human impact of decisions made — or evaded — in the corridors of power. …
Resonating through our stories are the cadences of ordinary Americans engaged in an urgent national conversation. And, mindful of the idea that journalists write history’s first draft, we constantly reminded ourselves that America’s social progress is, first and foremost, a story of the courage and sacrifice of ordinary women and men willing to put their bodies on the line to face down injustice. From slave revolts to suffragettes, Selma to Stonewall, from the epic mining and railroad strikes of the late 19th century to the Delano farmworkers’ strike of the 1960s and more, it was the courage of ordinary Americans willing to defy injustice that earned us the rights and dignity we take for granted today.
-- Tony Karon, Goodnight, and good luck
I am hoping that they can maintain the website intact or migrate the content, but I've already seen at least one 404 error on not-that-old content. There is always the Wayback Machine, but it's unclear if all of the cable content will be captured there.
There's one bright spot: In the shutdown announcement, there was also a promise that the international Aj Jazeera would expand in the US.
The announcement of AJAM’s closure coincides with a decision by its global parent company to commit to a significant expansion of its worldwide digital operations into the U.S. market.
-- Al Jazeera Staff, Al Jazeera America to shut down
There's also concern for the AJAM staff -- another large pool of journalists released into the wild. The same article offers praise and hints of support.
[Al Jazeera America CEO Al] Anstey praised the Al Jazeera America staff as “a brilliant team made up of the most committed, professional and dedicated people … In the months to come, we will do everything that we can to support you, to work with you and to ensure you are shown the respect you deserve.”
Despite its initial struggle for TV ratings, the newcomer network was quickly and repeatedly recognized by its industry peers for the excellence of its journalism. Within months of launching, AJAM began collecting prestigious prizes — from Peabody, Emmy, Gracie, Eppy and DuPont awards to a Shorty Award, for best Twitter newsfeed, and Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Front Page awards and citations from groups such as the National Association of Black Journalists and the Native American Journalism.
So, to the staff of Al Jazeera America, goodnight, and good luck.