AJAM Lives! Sort of ….

Award-winning cable news channel Al Jazeera America will terminate all operations in the U.S. as of April 2016. AJAM staffers have created a portfolio site, Best of Al Jazeera America Digital. Besides memorializing great journalism, it should help digital reporters and producers find new jobs.

More:

“Al Jazeera America journalists built a site to help co-workers find their next job,” Kristen Hare, Poynter

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Al Jazeera America Is Signing Off

Award-winning cable news network Al Jazeera America will shut down at the end of April, AJAM executives announced on Wednesday.

“The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, ‘unbiased’ hard news coverage. In other words, it made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy.”

— Jordan Weissmann, “Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail,” Slate

AJAM says it will ramp up it’s Web offerings in future.

More:

“Al Jazeera America announces it will shut down by end of April,” Joshua Barajas, PBS Newshour

“Al Jazeera America to Shut Down by April,” John Koblin, New York Times

“Al Jazeera America to shut down,” Bradford Richardson, The Hill

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Cable Stocks Tumble as Subscribers Cut the Cord

Last week media and cable stocks slid and tumbled while Netflix stocks jumped 20%. CBS, Disney, Comcast, all down. Viacom dropped 41% over the last 3 months while Netflix is up 56% in the same quarter; during that time DISH Networks lost 81,000 paid subscribers. Time/Warner (HBO) stocks are at a 9-month low. 21st Century Fox stocks dropped 12%.

What’s a conventional paid-subscriber media business to do? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

“’We’re in a mature-to-declining kind of linear TV business as we know it,’ said Dish Network Corp. Chief Executive Charlie Ergen on an earnings call Wednesday. ‘We think we’re at the beginning stages of [a streaming] business that’s going to grow and accelerate.’”

— “Media stocks clobbered as Netflix drives customers to dump cable,” Trey Williams, MarketWatch

More:

“Cracks in the cable business send media stocks tumbling,” Thad Moore, Washington Post

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Donald Trump Cancels GOP Reality Show

Donald Trump, celebrity casino owner, beauty pagent producer, reality TV star, and part-time wanna-be politician, canceled his upcoming Las Vegas extravaganza, a GOP presidential debate starring not one but two candidates (not counting himself). Of all the dubious contenders for the Republican nomination, only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum signed on.

Rather than staging a two-contestant reality show, The Donald (all together now) fired himself, cancelling the production. He says he did it so he can run for president himself. We think he did it so the television audience wouldn’t learn the answer to that age-old question,”What if Donald Trump threw a party and nobody came?”

On second thought, The Donald could have augmented the debate panel with his other celebrity chums. Certainly Charlie Sheen, Paula Abdul, or Paris Hilton can match the political wisdom of Mr. Trump and the moral integrity of Mr. Gingrich.

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Top Chef Tour at Eastern Market

Cable TV’s Top Chef tour is parked at Capitol Hill’s Eastern Market this weekend, pitting Carla Hall, Ariane Duarte, and Spike Mendelsohn against each other. The real action is in the bus (above) where six prep chefs and three runners do the real work. On Saturday, two hundred people watched this spectacle, half of them standing in the hot sun. Amazing.

Sarah Palin’s Hamburger on the Hoof

Here’s a wild game recipe from former Temp-Governor Sarah Palin: Caribou Hamburger. You know it’s fresh because you start grinding it while the animal is still alive. Here’s how:

Take one free-range, fresh and local Alaska caribou. Instead of downing it with one or two well-placed high-powered rifle shots, shred it with about five rounds. Burger meat the “Caribou Barbie” way. 

Oh, wait. She missed four out of five shots. The feat of arms is featured on her cable TV  show on the Learning Channel. The show really was educational. We learned the truth about Sarah Palin The Mighty Hunter, anyway.

 

Bonus feature: Do You Have What it Takes? Caribou Tracking. Take the quiz!

 Update:  “Sarah Palin succeeded in doing the impossible this week … when she faced her biggest wildlife challenge to date — Kate Gosselin.” More from Kirkland Hamill here.

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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