Al Jazeera US Elections 2020

6 min readFeb 17, 2021

الجزيرة_أمريكا20#

Al Jazeera Arabic US Elections 2020 Coverage

OBJECTIVE

The United States presidential election is an exceptional occurrence that attracts the attention of media outlets around the world. In 2020, Aljazeera channel managed to produce a distinctive and diversified coverage engendering a strategic digital campaign that outperformed the typical TV news materials in terms of interaction and audience reach. The digital content of this campaign was crafted under unified hashtag الجزيرة_أمريكا20# with aim to target the Arab public with a focused interest on American politics or a general interest in American news, along with the Arab public whose status quo is directly connected to the US election results.
Al Jazeera US Elections 2020 Unified Hashtag الجزيرة_أمريكا20#

The target audience included both a primary public constituted of +18 males and females of the Arab world & a secondary public represented in +18 males and females of the US. The main goals of the 2020 US elections campaign merged between two crucial factors:

The editorial Accuracy & Alignment with Al Jazeera TV editorial lines
Produce engaging content in order to achieve audience engagement & growth

Campaign goals:

Educating the viewership on the process and mechanisms of the US Elections.
Connecting with the current audiences and attracting a new audience interested in the US Elections.
Reaching a new audience that is interested in the cultural and social aspects of the American concerns.
Producing original digital content in an interactive template that can stimulate the public’s engagement rates on Al Jazeera social media platforms.

STRATEGY

What distinguishes this campaign is the strategy followed to reach the aforementioned goals that have been set in a way that combines (The 3 Es) Educate, Entertain, & Engage.

Al Jazeera Digital Newsroom team produced diversified content that transformed the overwhelming typical TV news version into original digital content tailored to fit with news consummation behaviors for the users of social media platforms. These digital products of the US Elections under hashtag الجزيرة_أمريكا20# have been highly consumed and requested thanks to the proper coordination between the TV & Digital Newsroom which resulted in a rich and informative news material that generated a remarkable audience engagement across social media platforms.

Another specificity of this campaign lies in the diversity of the topics discussed and the distinctive templates of its digital products. Instead of promoting purely political coverage, the purpose was to balance between the “3E” and raise the awareness needed about the cultural and social angles of the American status quo. The following are examples that illustrate the type of digital products adopted in the campaign:

Consistent stories, social cards, infographics, albums, field reports, an Instagram filter.
Ejaz US (Ejaz means in Brief): a condensed summary of daily news with a focus on US Elections in stories & video template.
Profile: A digital product published across social media platforms, discovering the bio & path of candidate president & vice president (Biden, Trump, Kamala, Pence).
Field Reports: Series of journalism reports produced during the Elections period.
US VLOGS: Series of vlogs covering multiple social & community topics in the US.
Alo America: User-Generated Content from the US.
Al Mostachar: “Means The Consultant” the product targeted to get some insights & info from experts around the US Elections.
Kashaf: A social media show with the aim to dig into specific subjects related to the Arab audience in the US.

The content strategy timeline that was developed to introduce this campaign to the audience highlighted four phases:

The first phase (from 17/9 to 22/9) was the preliminary stage that introduced the public to the US election process as well as the voting system and raised awareness about the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans and their ideological lines.
The second phase (from 23/9 to 22/10) covered the presidential debates and dwelled on informative content that portrayed the history and the political orientations of the candidates (Trump and Biden).
The third phase (from 23/10 to 1/11) marked the countdown of the elections as the content conveyed an analytical reading of the expected results and a closer look at the evolution of events in multiple states of the US.
The fourth phase (after 2/11) was live continuous coverage of the developments of events in the presidential electoral scene till the announcement of the results and the inauguration of the new president.

RESULTS

The 2020 US Elections campaign held by Aljazeera was very successful as portrayed in the performance reports and the results of this project. Al Jazeera’s coverage of the elections on its digital platforms was marked by a diversity in its products that were strategically implemented and shared according to a specific plan.
Al Jazeera’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube platforms were able to provide special coverage and give continuous updates vis-a-vis the election campaigns of Biden and Trump.

During the four stages of this digital campaign, it was clear that the audience response and engagement across the social media platforms of Aljazeera demonstrates the predominance of its coverage in the Arab media scene.

Despite the aggressive TV coverage of the channel which broadcasted more than 600 TV news reports and live broadcasts, the choice of the digital media came in the light of a strategy that aims to produce interactive news content in an engaging and attractive digital format.

In line with this aim, Aljazeera unified Hashtag:

Facebook: 372M views and 38.6M interactions
Twitter: 35M views, 216.5M impressions, and 750K Interactions.
YouTube: 164.2M views, 23.3M Watched Hours, Live-stream 36.6M views