Al Jazeera English Hits One-Year Mark

DOHA, November 14: Al
Jazeera English, the English-language news and current affairs channel based in
the Middle East, celebrates its one-year anniversary tomorrow with expanded
distribution to more than 100 million homes around the world.

The channel, with
broadcast centers in Doha, Juala Lumpur, London and Washington D.C., currently
reaches more than 100 million cable and satellite homes around the world, up
from 80 million subscribers at launch. Viewers also find the channel’s
programming through IPTV, mobile technologies and a dedicated channel on
YouTube. Al Jazeera English is the first international TV news channel to
provide a single 24-hour news feed to the entire English-speaking world.

To celebrate the
anniversary, the channel continues to promote a variation on its First
Person strand, titled First
Person: Children, as well as a
variety of exclusive reports and live presentations.

First Person: Children is an account of the news delivered by children,
in which they reveal their hopes and fears as they talk about the circumstances
and conditions they live in. The reports will come from locations including
Afghanistan, China, Gaza, Haiti, Iraq, Indonesia, Moscow, Venezuela, and Sudan.

Among the exclusive
reports Al Jazeera has prepared for broadcast are a look at Iraq’s refugee
crisis by Alan Fisher; a series on poverty in the U.S. by John Cookson; and a
behind-the-scenes report of an ICRC training camp, where armed members of
Palestinian factional groups are taught international humanitarian law and
first aid, by Nour Odeh.

The channel is also
planning live specials from Syria, Nigeria, Southern Thailand, Kosovo, Haiti
and Venezuela.

“We can all be proud of
our achievements,” said Nigel Parsons, the managing director of Al Jazeera
English. “We proved the skeptics wrong and created a new channel that is
already recognized as one of the major voices in global journalism.”

—By Ned Berke