Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

It's been a month since I've started my new gig as Head of Online at Al Jazeera English (AJE). Which is a fancy way of saying that I'm leading AJE's online operations and serving as website Editor-in-Chief.

When my appointment was announced, the brief was:

• We need to be able to seek out new opportunities to connect and converse with our audiences.
• We need to develop new strategies to reach out to youth and online audiences more effectively.
• We need to build further interactivity and community in our online offering.
• We need to work towards seamless cross production and planning between News, Programmes and the web.
• And we need to put in place technology and infrastructure to sustain a rich user experience

Like most folk in our industry, I've been thinking about what a news website should look like for a long time. In fact, it was exactly a year to date that I kicked off a conversation on Twitter on what the most important elements of a new news offering should be :

My friend Kevin Anderson (who is the blogs editor at the Guardian) curated the answers to this question at Corante - the summary is well worth reading.

Of course, we don't have the luxury of building a news site from the ground up. And therein lies the most challenging aspect of transitioning from being a "scrappy" web entrepreneur type to a news manager type. From being able to think up an idea in the shower, then get into the office and excite a bunch of people to hack out a proof-of-concept before dark, to having to deal with all manner of constraints and risks.

Not that it's a problem - if there was anything I've learnt at KPMG, it was that risks are meant to be managed and constraints can often be useful in defining solutions.

It's just a different game - having spent so long being the new media evangelist in the organisation, trying to innovate at the edges, to moving bang into the centre and having to innovate from within. It's always easier being on the outside shouting slogans, than being inside and having to manage change.

Of course, being on the inside has it's benefits. Not least that I am privileged to have a team of close to 50 talented editors, journalists and translators based across the world who work 24/7 to bring you the news.

Expect much leetness....