On the al jazeera Phone Number...

I love it. I made the suggestion in the post below that English language al Jazeera would be helped by having a listed phone number for their D.C. headquarters. A couple of commenters have called my attention to a D.C. area phone number on the al Jazeera website. Well I tried that number and guess what? it’s a recording on which the woman says she doesn’t check for messages, but you should get in touch with their NYC PR firm. This is not generally how a serious news operation works, since serious news operations like to make themselves available to the public for often invaluable tips.

Nonetheless, as those who have read the previous post will have noted, this is is exactly what I did: call their PR firm. I spoke with a woman there asking her how English language al Jazeera and its Arabic sister channel would be covering the Iranian Holocaust denier convocation. She promised to get back to me. That was last Friday. The conference has been over for two days. I still haven’t heard from her.

What to we learn from this? As I said, the al Jazeera phone number is not listed in the conventional meaning of “listed”– that is a number someone in the public could call 411 and get if perchance they were not within range of a computer terminal. Two, even the phone number they give on their website is not really a working phone number but a reference to a PR firm which fails to respond to inquiries.

So I stand by my suggestion that a working listed phone number would be a good first step for English language al Jazeera to gain legitimacy. A good second step can be found in the post below.