A day after being named a winner of their first duPont Award, Al Jazeera English announced another milestone: they’re now in a quarter billion households around the world. But only a fraction of those homes are in the world’s largest English-speaking nation: the U.S.
Al Jazeera English is available in 130 countries, but in the U.S., the channel can only be found on cable systems in Washington DC, New York, Burlington, VT, Toledo, OH and, recently, Chicago and Los Angeles. AJE has also announced it will open a Chicago bureau next month and already has bureaus in DC, New York, Los Angeles and Miami. (Al Jazeera as a whole has 70 bureaus around the world.)
And while it’s only available in 5 million homes in the U.S., 40% of AJE’s web traffic comes from the Unites States.
AJE faces stiff competition for news viewers in the U.S., and not just from American networks. Last week, the BBC announced their 24-hour BBC World News had struck a deal with Comcast, adding the channel to 15 million American homes in markets including Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Minneapolis. BBC World News is available in 300 million homes around the world.