Text of report by Qatari newspaper The Peninsula website on 30 January
Doha: The Al Jazeera Network have adapted to restricted communications in Egypt by adopting innovative social media techniques to extract news and views from the country.
While ordinary Egyptians have not had access to social networks like Twitter, Al Jazeera have been using Skype to record messages by members of the public. Al Jazeera has made the recordings available on Audioboo, promoting them through Facebook.
Al Jazeera’s web output has proved incredibly popular in the last 24 hours. The livestream from their English news channel has been viewed for 26 million minutes in the last 12 hours. The livestream has even been twice as popular as the website itself, putting more pressure on US cable platforms in particular to air the channel.
A spokesman said “Al Jazeera has been the most searched for term on the internet after Egypt itself, according to Alexa. The outside world was starved of first hand accounts when the internet went black in Egypt. Al Jazeera filled the void with live reports from across the country as the world flocked to our website for the latest developments on the ground.”
(Source: The Peninsula website, Doha, in English 30 Jan 11 via BBC Monitoring)
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on Jan 31st, 2011 at 14:42
Just read the breaking news- the Al-Jazeera journalists have been arrested..
on Jan 31st, 2011 at 14:47
Thanks Jasmin. Al Jazeera now says they have been released, but their equipment has been confiscated.
on Feb 12th, 2012 at 18:02
Al Jazeera was never arrested! They were just accused and then claims were resolved..