going as his assistant nervously beckons him
to move on to his next appointment. “A pic-
ture supported with just a little bit of
words—that is magnificent.”
Wadah Khanfar
continued from page 79
side in a way that Israel and Palestine have
yet to do.
Khanfar’s wandering eventually led him
to journalism. He had never considered it a
profession, because being a journalist in the
Middle East meant serving the government
or one of its intelligence agencies. But, he
says, “Al Jazeera was something different.”
Khanfar started as an on-air pundit for the
upstart network in 1997, positioning himself
as an expert on African politics. Soon, he
was filing stories on health and education. A
one-man shop, he’d turn on his TV camera
using a remote control, so he could simultaneously talk and film himself.
He spent several years in Africa,
reporting on tribal life and the
clashes in Zimbabwe between
farmers and the country’s
leader, Robert Mugabe.
After 9/11, Khanfar says,
“my life was interrupted.” The
network transferred him to
Afghanistan in December 2001,
shortly after a U.S. missile destroyed the Al Jazeera bureau in
Kabul. On the eve of the Iraq
war, he smuggled himself into
the Kurdish region of northern
Iraq. With the fall of Saddam
Hussein, he moved to Baghdad
to head the network’s operations, kicking off his management career and building the
bureau into Al Jazeera’s largest
field operation before going to
Doha to join Al Jazeera’s executive team.
Even now, he loves nothing
more than talking about old-fashioned, mission-driven journalism. On the final day of my
four-day visit, just as I’m about
to leave for the airport, Khanfar
makes a roomful of people wait
as he pontificates on the correct
way to tell a story. “Once you
look at the scene and you see
the picture, you start writing
the script in your head,” he tells
me. “You add some words to it,
not too many words.” He keeps
Khanfar runs the network with a mix of
smarts, ambition, and playfulness. One moment, he’s professorial in his analysis of how
various countries have handled regime
change, sitting back in his chair and delivering fully formed paragraphs. The next, he’s
joking and laughing, the dimple in the middle
of his slightly unshaven chin growing more
prominent with each guffaw. He’ll tease
almost anyone: I watch him heckle a visitor
from Milan about which farmers produce the
best olive oil, the Italians or the Palestinians.
In the middle of a serious discussion, he’ll
turn playful, referring to his public-relations
minder as “His Royal Highness.” Like President George W. Bush, hardly one of his role
models, he has a propensity to bestow sarcastic nicknames on staffers he likes.
One thing he is deeply serious about is
building the network’s social-media pres-
ence. The network’s seven-person social-
media team—all under the age of 32,
speakers of Arabic, English, Spanish, Portu-
guese, French, Turkish, Dutch, Moroccan,
German, and, as one young staffer says,
“various forms of slang”—is based in a small
beige office down a hallway past the British
anchor delivering an hourly newscast, the
online editor’s office (a green sign reads GET
EXCITED TO MAKE THINGS), and a prayer
room. They’re dressed eclectically, too, some
in jeans, skirts, and blazers, others in white
robes or abayas—and, of course, sneakers.
Their boss is 27-year-old Riyaad Minty, who
dropped out of university in South Africa at
18 to work for a mobile marketing startup.
Khanfar hired him in 2007, first to work on
the network’s mobile presence and then to
head up its social-media efforts. Several Al
Jazeera employees tell me this is one of
Khanfar’s best leadership traits—hiring
bright people and giving them lots of leeway.
