The Newsroom...but real...

Today the YES Abroad Bosnia group visited the offices of Al Jazeera Balkans here in Sarajevo! The Sarajevo studio is the largest one of the Balkan network and handles most of the workload. This particular field trip was great because the world of broadcast news has always interested me, but I have never really known much about it, and boy did I learn a lot today.

A nice staffer at the Al Jazeera office gave us a full tour of the facility. We saw the control room, the offices, the studio, the editing bay and even the frenzied newsroom where headlines from all over the world roll in in real time. It was kind of amazing.

As she was walking us around she told us about how Al Jazeera's presence in Sarajevo has changed the media landscape here. Al Jazeera is funded by the state of Qatar so it does not rely on the advertising money or political parties in the region like most Bosnian press does making it a much less biased source for news. She also didn't shy away from addressing some of the criticism the Al Jazeera network has garnered in the US and across the globe. (They just launched Al Jazeera Americas, but did you know Al Jazeera was banned in the US for five years?! Why did I not already know about that?!) All in all it was a really interesting.

 I felt like I came away from our visit to Al Jazeera with more knowledge than what I went in with, which is always a plus. Our host even talked about maybe having us back for a day sometime in the spring! I'm pumped, I could never be a hardcore journalist like these people, but hanging around their office sure was fun!