All-News Television Spreading its Wings

International Herald Tribune – January 9, 2006

Doreen Carvajal

The competition stares dead straight into Ulysse Gosset's eyes every moment he sits at his cluttered desk at temporary headquarters near the glassy Seine.

Before him flickers a television tuned to Atlanta-based CNN, which 25 years ago created a powerful genre with a 24-hour all-news network that now reaches more than two billion people.

For other countries, such global power is as tantalizing as new oil wells, inspiring fresh competition from India to Russia and Qatar to France, where all-news channels are emerging with different perspectives. But to sway the world, the messengers have settled on a lingua franca: English.

Gosset, who is helping to lead a project to create an all-news French channel this year, is unabashed about why its breaking headlines will be delivered in French and English. "Today news channels are part of the global battle in the world," he said. "It's as important as traditional diplomacy and economic strength. If we have a real desire to communicate around the world, we need to do it with the right medium, and that's English."

The hotly debated French project, which remains unnamed and is scheduled to start by December with E75 million, or $91 million, in government funding, is one of several all-news channels that are rushing headlong to television screens and Web sites this year.

Veteran television executives say the burst of all-news channels was ignited by two critical forces: the falling cost of technology and television's power in the international marketplace.

"Many communities want to have their voice in the global conversation," said Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's World Service and Global News Division.

In the spring, Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based bane of the Bush administration, plans to roll out its English version. A Kremlin-funded news channel in English, Russia Today, began broadcasting last month despite hacker attacks that briefly shut it down.

In India, a country of 15 official languages where English is deemed an "associate" tongue, urban television viewers will soon become the focus of an old-fashioned media war in the language of Shakespeare.

One competitor is The Times of India, which announced an alliance in October with Reuters to start an all-news channel in English. Two months later, a rival with a familiar brand name slipped quickly onto India's cable and satellite channels.

That new channel, CNN IBN, is a partnership of CNN and the Indian broadcaster IBN, which was forged in October. CNN IBN aired with little fanfare, but quickly sought to make a name for itself with investigative reports about government corruption and juicy tales of the local movie industry, like the report last week: "Big Boys, Smuggled Toys: How Bollywood Uses Illegally Imported Cars."

The Times of India's Times Now is playing catch-up this month with a mix of news and weekend features, like a show called "The Foodie" and a business program, "Brand Equity," that are aimed at Indian urbanites.

Sunil Lulla, chief executive of Times Now, said his company chose English for its channel because it is the language of business and metropolitan India. "We believe," he said, "that over the years to come, with a growing economy, a young consumer market, and as India gets more connected to the world, more people will be looking at news as a business tool."

For the record, CNN executives say they welcome new competition. "We're the pioneers of the 24-hour news business," said Claudia Coles, a CNN International spokeswoman in London. "Our view is that it further establishes the importance of the media and challenges us to do better."

But many of the all-news newcomers are drawing more inspiration from Al Jazeera, which they say has created an influential global voice for Arabs in the world that was missing until the channel appeared.

While the channel, started in 1996 and financed by the emir of Qatar, says it will begin broadcasting an English version in the spring, so far it has not announced any distribution deals with satellite or cable operators to carry the channel. Charlotte Dent, an Al Jazeera spokeswoman, would not comment on whether any alliances had been struck.

Using Al Jazeera as a model, a group of investors and supporters met in Nairobi last month to plan the creation of a pan-African channel in French and English. They are now developing a business plan and have received commitments from some cable and satellite operators to carry a new channel, according to Salim Amin, who is leading the effort and is chief executive of Camerapix, a television production and photography company in Nairobi and London.

"We're not looking at Al Jazeera for their contents or their controversial nature," Amin said. "We're looking at them because they started as a very small set-up. We don't have a network or media that enables us to talk to each other and to send the message out to the rest of the world. All we see on the international networks about Africa is very negative: famine, war, disease, death, HIV. There are positive things happening here that never get highlighted."

Kenneth Tiven, a former CNN executive and a consultant who is advising the African group, said the falling price of new technology had opened the way for smaller countries with less resources to start news channels with high ambitions.

"Today if you have a Mac laptop, just about everything you want to do is in that laptop," he said. "You feed your video into the computer. You edit your video and you output it back to a videotape or a network server. That's about E3,000 versus what would have been roughly E80,000 in the past."

With low-cost technology, the African group maintains it can start an all-news channel with a $20 million budget, possibly by March 2007.

That is far less than the E75 million that the French project will get for its seed money, and the French channel is also drawing on the journalism resources of the country's public broadcasters.

Gosset, who is in the middle of finding permanent offices to move out of current quarters at France Télévisions, said it was not expected to make a profit, but advertising would be needed to defray some costs.

"We know it is very difficult for any international news channel to make money from advertisements," he said, "but we think there is a real possibility to sell some advertising. It's a complement."

Deutsche Welle, Germany's all-news broadcaster to the world, has some experience in that area. Since 1992 it has been producing a bilingual German and English news program that switches segments hourly in the two languages. Last year, DW started providing the same programming in Arabic.

"Every single one of us has difficulties trying to sell advertisements," said Cristoph Lanz, managing director of DW. "There is no global advertising or commercial market. There are only a handful of really global companies, and even some German companies like Siemens are not selling themselves as German companies."

But after 13 years of delivering news in English as a second language, the channel's management is satisfied with results. During big news events like the outbreak of the Iraq war, American viewers turned increasingly to the program for another perspective, Lanz said, and even sent letters and e-mails.

"There are more viewers watching it in the English language than German," Lanz said. "And that doesn't have to do with a small amount of Germans watching. It just has to do with the fact that the world is six billion people and there are just 80 million Germans and there are maybe 150 million German speakers. If you have a mission statement to reach out to the world, then you have to reach across the language gap."

With a E69 million annual budget and a viewership of about 29 million weekly, DW is chasing what the French, the Russians, the Africans and the Indians are also yearning for. Their target viewers are what DW calls "opinion leaders and the information elite."

The French are actually even more precise, illustrating why they want a big megaphone. In the first stage of the new channel, they will work to make it accessible in New York, home to the United Nations, and in Washington, base for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

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