Al Jazeera

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.

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CBS News, NBC News and, for the first time, Al Jazeera English, have just been announced as winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards.

CBS News “60 Minutes” will be honored for Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan‘s report from the frontlines of the war in Afghanistan, and NBC News, along with Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, will be honored for breaking news coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings.

Al Jazeera English will receive its first duPont silver baton for a documentary about shortcomings in the recovery efforts in Haiti and NOVA, on PBS, will be honored with a duPont award for a documentary on Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

“This truly dynamic group of news organizations and journalists represent the best in broadcast and digital news reporting,” said Bill Wheatley, duPont Jury chair and former executive vice president of NBC News. “Journalists are using technology in new ways to effectively tell these important stories covering the news, issues and events that are critical to our society.”

In all, 14 awards will be presented during a ceremony on Thurs., Jan. 19. CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley and Michele Norris from NPR will host the 70th anniversary of the duPont awards, presented each year to honor excellence in broadcast and digital journalism.

TVSpy has more on several local news stations who will be honored with duPont Awards.

Last week we noted that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Al Jazeera for its coverage in the Middle East during an interview with Sir David Frost. Today, Al Jazeera aired another interview with Rumsfeld, taped the same day but with a markedly different tone.

Abderrahim Foukara was quite confrontational with Rumsfeld, who evaded the interviewer’s line of questioning:

You can compare Foukara’s interview with the relatively tame Frost interview, which is embedded after the jump.

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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who once called Al Jazeera’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” has apparently made amends with the broadcaster. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reports that in an interview to air tonight, Rumsfeld praised the channel for its recent reportage:

“Its audience has grown and it can be an important means of communication in the world,” he said of the channel.

“I am delighted you are doing what you are doing.”

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The director-general of Al Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, has resigned after eight years leading the family of cable news channels. His resignation comes after U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks seem to indicate that Khanfar was willing to change editorial content at the request of U.S. authorities, as the AP notes:

The leaked U.S. diplomatic cable dated October 2010 indicated that Khanfar was in constant contact with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, responding to U.S. complaints of negative coverage and promising to tone down items on the station’s website. The cables referred to Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs as “MFA” which passed him some of the DIA reports.

Al-Jazeera said in a statement that Khanfar expressed his desire to resign in July, and that his replacement was arranged one month ago to “to ensure a smooth transition.” The statement did not refer to the leaked cable.

In an email to Al Jazeera staff, Khanfar said that the networks had no agenda:

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An interesting story from Al Jazeera reporter Gabriel Elizondo. Elizondo is crossing the U.S., collecting thoughts on people from all over on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. He had planned to stop at a high school football game in Texas, but ended up receiving an exceptionally cold welcome:

So I tried my best: “So, I guess Mrs Yauck told you who I am. I am a journalist crossing the country doing random stories about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 and I was hoping to talk to some people here about it at the game, and get some opinions.”

He then said something I could not entirely make out, because his voice sort of quivered from a combination of being obviously furious and nervous at the same time.

But I am pretty sure he said:

“I think it was damn rotten what they did.”

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Al Jazeera English correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, who was the face of that channel during the Egypt uprising, is joining NBC News as a foreign correspondent in September. Mohyeldin will be based in the Middle East for NBC, where he will contribute to all of the company’s platforms and networks.

Mohyeldin previously worked for Fox News and CNN in the Middle East, but started his career at NBC News in 2001 as a desk assistant.

“We’re excited to welcome Ayman back to the NBC News family as a foreign correspondent,” said NBC news president Steve Capus in a statement. “An extremely passionate and hard working journalist and producer, Ayman has a great deal of experience in various newsrooms covering major conflicts, and we think he will be an excellent addition to our team of correspondents.”

The move is a huge blow for AJE, which brought Mohyeldin stateside a few months back on a whirlwind press tour.

More information in the official announcement, after the jump.

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Maybe we can finally call this a “thing.” Back in March, we noted how an anchor for Libya’s state-run TV network delivered the news while brandishing an AK-47 and promising to defend Colonel Gadhaffi to the death.

Today, with Libyan rebels in Tripoli, Libyan TV anchors are once again brandishing firearms in an effort to “defend” the channels from attack.

Al Jazeera English caught the comments:

For Al Jazeera English, priority number one is still to grow its distribution in the U.S. But the challenges it is facing in that regard are not stopping the channel from pursuing a branding campaign to drive awareness. AJE recently launched a branding campaign in the U.K. (pictured right).

Advertising Age talks to network executives about their efforts to grow distribution and enhance its brand.

“They would marry up with the PR team we’ve got globally doing the job,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of really good pickup in the press in the United States. That definitely helps us in terms of the recognition,” Mr. Anstey said.

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Al Jazeera English and one of its biggest stars, Ayman Mohyeldin, get profiled in a wide-ranging GQ cover story this week.

Michael Paterniti trails Mohyeldin as he makes the media rounds in New York, and follows him as he returns to the Middle East:

Though Mohyeldin’s journalistic reputation continues to grow—born in Egypt, raised in Michigan, started as a gofer for NBC News, reared as a producer at CNN, first appeared on-camera for Al Jazeera in 2006—his is hardly a household name, not in America at least. And yet he’s the closest the network has to some rough approximation of an Anderson Cooper, good-looking, with a boyish air of derring-do.

Later, he visits AJE’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and explains the channel’s philosophy… and funding:

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