eventually will view Al Jazeera as a
significant news organization. “It
looks so exotic to Americans, but in
the Arab world, it’s CNN,” says Steve
Clemons, a senior fellow at the New
America Foundation, who specializes
in international affairs. “Fox runs a
much narrower band of programming than Al Jazeera.”
life inside al jazeera
1 / In the studio of Al Jazeera
Arabic, anchor Iman Ayad,
in blue, and presenter
Abdelkader Aiad prepare for
an interview as protests
sweep across North Africa
and the Middle East.
Throughout the Arab world,
Al Jazeera is viewed like
CNN—people watch it in
airports, shops, and
restaurants for minute-by-
minute news.
2 / Al Jazeera English
producers and editors work
the phones in the newsroom
in late March, to book guests,
talk to field reporters, write
scripts, and stay abreast of
the rapidly shifting political
situations in Egypt, Yemen,
Syria, and Libya.
3 / The net work is based in
Doha, Qatar, and is owned by
the Qatari government, but
the staff is diverse, with
more than 50 nationalities
represented.
4 / Riyaad Minty oversees
the seven-person social-
media team that combs
through the hundreds of cell-
phone videos from citizen
journalists who have distin-
guished the network’s cover-
age since the regime change
in Tunisia. Before the unrest,
the team had built a platform
that made it easy for viewers
to contribute content.
that Al Jazeera may somehow be
linked to Al Qaeda.
Khanfar, effectively both CEO and
editorial director, deserves the credit
for growing Al Jazeera into a network
capable of seizing this moment. His
secret may be that, despite a decade
working as a manager, he still thinks
of himself as a field journalist. “There
are many books written about man-
agement: ‘How to Become a Manager
in Five Minutes,’ ” Khanfar says,
laughing out loud. “I don’t think that’s
right. The first principle of manage-
ment is to observe and to understand
the true spirit of the network.”
That spirit lies in Al Jazeera’s
scrappiness, its diversity, and its abil-
ity to persevere amid the chaos and
complexity of the Middle East. Figur-
ing out how to circumvent an Egyp-
tian dictator who cut off the country’s
Internet and the network’s connec-
tion to the world. Trusting viewers’
cell-phone videos to tell the story of
the revolution in Tunisia, where the
network was then banned. Recogniz-
ing that the news industry is chang-
ing, and building additional news
programs and reporting platforms
around social media, particularly
Twitter and user-generated video, to
prepare for a different world. And
finding ways to spread Khanfar’s
optimism that the rest of the world
khanfar has spent a lifetime thriving
amid uncertainty. Born in 1968, the
year after Israel began occupying the
West Bank, he grew up there, in Rama,
a Palestinian farming village of about
500 residents. “I’ve seen to what extent
chaos creates a sense of an unimagi-
nable, unexpected future,” he says as
we leave the daily editorial meeting.
“You can’t buy a house or establish a
farm. You don’t know how the political
map will look next year.”
His father, a teacher, cultivated
olive trees and owned a small business
on the side selling olive oil. Khanfar
attended high school in an adjacent
town, walking the 4 miles each way or
riding a donkey over the mountain-
ous terrain. He calls it a simple, beau-
tiful childhood, if not a stable one. He
remembers listening to BBC Radio as
his major source of news.
Khanfar spent his twenties traveling from one tumultuous political
situation to another. He met his wife
at a protest rally at the University of
Jordan, picking her out of a crowd
because she seemed so fierce and
determined. They traveled together to
Sudan, where he enrolled in an African Studies graduate program at the
moment that Army Brigadier Omar
Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir led a coup
to become president. In 1994, Khanfar arrived in South Africa for another
graduate program as Nelson Mandela
took power and the vestiges of apartheid collapsed. Listening to Khanfar
recount his life story is like reading a
case study of the various ways leaders
try to navigate change. He notes drily
that South Africa managed to encourage blacks and whites to live side by
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