Al Jazeera English Plans Show Centered on Social Networking

posted on: Mar 7, 2011

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As the Arab world reels with revolutions fomented in part online, Al Jazeera English is planning a new talk show that has social networking at its heart.

It’s just lucky timing, says Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, the voluble young producer and co-host of the show, called The Stream, which is scheduled to appear on the English language version of Al Jazeera starting in May. The video above is a teaser for the show, which has been in the works since late last year. But as Africa and the Middle East see revolutions organized in part on Facebook (and on dating sites) and publicized through Twitter and YouTube, the concept looks prescient.

The core idea of The Stream is that it’s not scripted in the ordinary way. Rather than give the hosts a script, typed rundown or teleprompter cues, the producers will make extensive use of tweets, Facebook wall posts and YouTube videos from the most engaged viewers and the web at large.

That’s not to say it will be crowdsourced — producers are still making decisions about what topics to cover — but it will be deeply informed by an ongoing conversation with its viewers online.

“Inherently it is a show that would not exist without these kinds of users,” says Shihab-Eldin.

They’re even considering “scripting” the show with Storify, a utility that makes it easy to assemble tweets into narratives.

The idea is to reach a younger, more plugged-in audience than most news talk shows. That audience is sophisticated about social networking tools, however, and can quickly detect if Twitter updates (for instance) are merely being used as window dressing for more traditional news approaches. Instead, The Stream aims to be a show that is born out of online activity. In addition to its website, the show has a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a collection of Storify-based news stories. And while the show runs just half an hour a day, the producers expect their online channels to be active around the clock online.

In other words, the talk show is a focal point for a 24/7 online community, rather than making the website a merely promotional vehicle for the show.

During the course of the show, they’ll read tweets and updates (and display them on-screen) as they come up. They’re also planning to interview guests using Skype — connection-quality issues be damned. In a screen test we saw at the Wired offices recently, the hosts bantered with each other and with in-studio guests, but also responded to viewers’ @ replies, played YouTube videos, and Skyped with social media mavens around the world. The studio was liberally sprinkled with monitors, and the show frequently cut to fullscreen tweets while the hosts read the 140-character updates out loud, hash tags and all.

“We’re very much going to be relying on what people are talking about,” says Shihab-Eldin.

The Stream will hit the airwaves just as its parent network sees a remarkable surge of interest online, particularly in America. Al Jazeera has had a 2,500 percent increase in web traffic in recent weeks, 60 percent of which is coming from the United States. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a fan of the network, which she says offers “real news, instead of a million commercials and arguments between talking heads.”

And as it has grown, Al Jazeera has proven savvy about embracing the kinds of grass-roots, new-media news production that The Stream centers on. Indeed, the producers of the show see it as a kind of test bed for the integration of video and online — and if it works, they hope their techniques will be adopted throughout the network.

“We’d kind of secretly love to be outdated in a year,” says Ben Connors, the show’s creative strategist and web guy.

Al Jazeera is not the only network to capitalize on social media: CNN displays tweets and YouTube videos, too. But The Stream, by putting social networking at its core, is aiming for a different way of making the news — and a different purpose.

“The democratization of the Arab world is directly related to the democratization of the media,” says Shihab-Eldin in the Storyboard podcast. “It’s not just about organizing protests … there are so many different ways in which social media is used to connect people across borders, but also to connect old media with new media, to fight the battle, to fight oppression.”

That’s the world that The Stream wants to flow through. When the show starts in a few months, we’ll be able to see if it lives up to the promise.

Dylan Tweney
Wired