Al Jazeera English introduces blog site

Posted by Emma Heald on October 14, 2009 at 11:01 AM

Al Jazeera English has launched a new blogging network, reported Journalism.co.uk. AJE Head of Online Mohamed Nanabhay said that he is "reasonably excited about it," although aware that it is something that many news organisations already have in place.

The blogs are divided up by geographical area: Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe and Middle East, with the addition of a business section. A selection of correspondents and presenters have been writing posts.

"We have always placed a strong emphasis on field journalism and prided ourselves on our extensive network of correspondents who are based across the world," said Nanabhay in his blog. "Just browsing through our correspondent blogs will give you a real sense of the breadth of our coverage, while diving into the posts provides real depth and insight into our world."

He added that all posts are semantically tagged using OpenCalais and licensed under a Creative Commons license. Readers can leave comments using their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID accounts.

Encouraging journalists to blog as well as to report allows them to focus more attention on the issues that interest them and offer a more personal point of view and hence can contribute to establishing a community of readers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk, Mohamed Nanabhay