About AmmanNet

In the fall of 2000, using the opportunities that the Internet provided, award winning Arab journalist Daoud Kuttab (with a group of independent media practitioners in Amman Jordan) launched in Amman, Jordan the Arab world’s first Internet radio. With funding from the Open Society Institute, the mayor of Amman, Nidal Al-Hadid, and the director of UNESCO's Amman office, Martin Hadlow launched the new web-based station on November 15. AmmanNet began its first year under the patronage of UNESCO and the Greater Amman Municipality. AmmanNet began producing audio reports, news bulletins and a variety of programming all of which were posted on the Net. Rebroadcasts of the programs (especially from nearby Palestinian stations) were pursued so as to create a terrestrial home for all the audio content that was being posted on the Internet. Large sectors of Jordanian society would thus have the opportunity to hear and follow radio programming created in their own country but being broadcast with the help of the Internet.

AmmanNet (the Voice of the Community) as its sub heading states has in reality become the voice of the community. AmmanNet has been creating content and broadcasting it on the Internet since 2000 as the first Arab Internet radio station. It began broadcasting terrestrially on 92.4 FM in the Amman metropolitan area in the summer of 2005. According to the license, the content included general programming excluding politics and news. But in September of the same year, it became the first independent radio station to broadcast news

From the news perspective you can hear every hour headline news and twice a day, the full newscasts (at the half hours). We focus almost entirely on local news with a courageous and balanced manner. The 30-minute full newscasts at 1:30 and 6:30 pm provide listeners with an in depth look at the most important local issues. Live interviews with experts and officials are supported by feature reports and the latest reaction of the Jordanian street on the most important events of the day.

Our live broadcasts cover the most important topics of interest to Jordanians; from the session of the Jordanian parliament (we are the first independent radio in the Arab world to broadcast live and unedited gavel-to-gavel coverage) to the most important football games. We provide play by play of matches of Jordan’s national team as well the games of the leading clubs. Our live coverage also includes important social, artistic and cultural issues as well as live shows during holidays like Eid al Adha, Eid al Fitr, Christmas and New Year.

AmmanNet provides a panorama of programs starting with the review of the daily press to the morning show tallet subuh, sports review, the musical program sama’i, bira’ihat al kahwa (cultural magazine), haqqi (legal awareness), school radio, diary of a refugee, sports interviews, marsad barlamani (parliamentary watch), eye on the media and the political program masaha lerra’i (space for opinions).

On the entertainment front we produce and broadcast remix, a music show that features interviews with leading Jordanian musicians, cinema zoom dealing with the big screen and our twice a week quiz show shu biddi arbah.

Our Internet coverage www.ammannet.net has made us a leading source of information and interactivity with Jordanians in and outside the country and has raised our standing as the leading Jordanian visited web site according to the international Alexa standings.

AmmanNet, has also become a leading training center with journalists from Jordan and others from Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Algeria, Palestine and Lebanon coming to participate in workshops about on-line broadcasting.

In September 2004, AmmanNet carried out a workshop for journalists from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Palestine. The results were fantastic. A web site was created specifically for the project and the participants were able in the short time to write, record, edit and upload their own reports. Part of the recommendations of the participants was that this kind of workshop be repeated because of the huge hunger for the tools that can make online reporting easier especially in countries that have restrictive media laws. Jordanian government spokeswoman Asma Khader and UNESCO officials in Amman attended the graduation of the workshop and were impressed with the results calling for more workshops that enable Arab journalists to use the Net for on line reporting both in text and audio

World Cup on AmmanNet radio

The 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany had been awaited for by millions of people throughout the world. In Jordan the games drew a big attraction with two Arab countries (Tunisia and Saudi Arabia) as well as favorite countries to Arab soccer fans like Brazil, Germany, Italy and France.

AmmanNet the Arab world's first Internet radio station and winner of the Gold Medal Award as well as the leading FM radio station in the capital Amman decided to buy the radio rights and broadcast the entire world cup live on its radio station along with a series of programs and updated world cup news broadcasts. The absence of any terrestrial TV station carrying the games forced Jordanians to search satellite frequencies to find the games. When they finally found a Turkish and a Swedish broadcast, many put their TV on mute and for their audio play in Arabic, they turned on AmmanNet, thus boosting our radio audience.

Sports fans in Amman have been following their favorite teams on AmmanNet Radio ever since our station has dedicated a daily 15 minute sports program as well and a weekly courageous radio program Manal and Sports dialogue. AmmanNet's recent FM broadcasts (since September 2005) have also included live broadcasts of the major local teams as well as the major matches of Jordan's national team.


AmmanNet knowledge transfer

Based on the request of many to benefit from the experience of AmmanNet, we organized a series of workshops on online broadcasting. The workshops included practical journalistic and online training as well as basic radio training and visits to Ammannet and contributions by AmmanNet director and staff. Each of the trainees left AmmanNet with an open source software that would allow them to set up their own internet radio.

Young journalists from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia as well as Yemen and the GCC countries participated in different workshops. To support the GCC and Yemen candidates, we organized a separate project aimed at setting up nine on-line radio stations and helping candidates from these countries develop the content and upload it while we provided them with initial technical support.

Other workshops organized by AmmanNet included the following:
• A workshop on human interest reporting for journalists from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait.

• A workshop on covering crimes of war with journalists from Palestine, Lebanon Jordan and Iraq.



Community projects initiated by AmmanNet

*Created, in cooperation with UNESCO, five freedom of express PSAs which were broadcast on most Arab TV stations.

*Organized the Amman leg of two televised town hall meetings for the program Chat the Planet.

* Organized a youth video exchange and video conference between Amman and San Francisco High school students which was broadcast on Link TV.

*Established a local transcription service for the weekly press conference of the Spokeswoman of the Jordanian government.

*Organized three election debates in 2003 in Amman dealing with local political issues, social issues, and a debate by women candidates.

*Set up, at the request of UNESCO, a web site dealing with the Iraqi constitution and welcoming open dialogue on line about the various drafts.

* Participated in the 16 day campaign for women's rights in December 2006

AmmanNet in support of independent Arab media

AmmanNet, along with the Washington-based IREX Institute, won a three year competitive grant aimed at improving media in the Arab world. AmmanNet's portion of the grant includes coordinating a yearly fellowship to the US for mid career journalists and supervising the distribution of ten grants to Arab documentary makers totally $150,000 annually. On the first of October 2006, twelve journalists from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Tunisia traveled to Chicago's North Western University for four weeks class based courses to be followed by six weeks of internship in a major US media outlet. Also 5 journalists from Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon have been chosen to receive grants to produce documentary films on controversial Arab social issues.


AmmanNet wins Gold Medal from Pan Arab Media Awards

AmmanNet, the Arab world's first Internet radio station, won the gold medal at the 2006 Pan Arab Media Awards. The ceremony, in its second year was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Amman, Thursday April 28. The first award ceremony was held in Dubai.

The Beirut registered Award is supported by the Arab League. The award aims to "promote the innovative spirit of web designers to meet professional and international standards, to promote intellectual and production opportunities."
Daoud Kuttab founder of AmmanNet hailed the prize as a recognition by the Arab world that the Net can be a strategic instrument to bypass traditional roadblocks to independent media in general and independent radio in particular.


Future Outlook
AmmanNet in its web and FM radio outlets will continue in developing, learning and pushing the limits of free expression.

We hope to also widen our activities both in Jordan and in nearby Arab countries. In Jordan we are looking forward to developing, partnering and at times establishing new radio stations that shares our beliefs and ideas about the independence of media. We will continue to lobby the Jordanian parliament and government to make further reforms in media legislation opening up the waves for more independent radio stations and removing the restrictions, especially the exorbitant fees that are applied to community –based radios.

If our efforts to introduce community radio stations throughout Jordan are successful, we would like to create a network of all these stations with the aim of exchanging content. Of special interest to us then would be the aim of creating a truly independent national news content which could be compiled as a result of input from the different stations and then distributed back to them so that they can, if they wish, have access to national news content or national news bulletins.
Furthermore, we expect to continue in our mission to extend technical and media training help to fellow media practitioners in the Arab world and in any other location where help is needed.

Citizens media is also an area of growth we hope to move into in the coming years. This can be in the form of training and giving air to armature reporters or in producing a blogging program that combines internet blogging with on air blogging that will be read along with reactions to those blogs. The program will also include interviewing bloggers and allowing them to use the airwaves to present their thoughts.

We would also like to continue working on expanding our professional media monitoring project so as to include as many Arab media outlets as possible. We would love to have a chance to produce a program monitoring Arab satellite stations as well as local Jordanian broadcasters. It was from the one time that we focused on reviewing Jordanian radio and TV stations using actualities from these stations that we received a very high volume of listeners and web browsers.

Another dream of ours is to produce a radio news parody. The Arab world is lacking in using comedy as means to critique political actions and news. A sarcastic news program can be a successful instrument of reform by critiquing politicians using comedy.

While for a long time we have avoided using the Internet to deliver video, we feel now that the success of short internet video casting will provide an opportunity to delve in this highly attractive media field. We might start by including some filming, then posting on the internet video reports and ultimately develop into the idea of video webcasting our live radio programs.