Today, Tuesday the 11th of March 2008 BBC Arabic will launch as a free to air 24 hours news channel. The channel is head quartered in London, UK and its aiming at the hearts and minds of the Arab lands of the middle east and as well the ever increasing Arabic speaking diaspora.
The channel will be going head to head in terms of target audience with Al Jazeera.
The count down has just completed and their first report has just started. My Arab colleagues are excited but initial reactions are “looks like crap”.
Nonetheless, this is an exciting development and it would be interesting to see how this will change the media landscape of the middle east.
Personally I am more excited to see how or whether this would affect the New Media landscape in the region. Traditionally Arabic broadcasters have been very slow to adopt new trends. This could change now that there is a potentially more agile competitor targeting their audience.
A point of note on the BBC Arabic website, it seems strange that it is left aligned though Arabic websites traditionally are right aligned as the script runs “right to left”.
Tags: bbc, aljazeera, new media
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