Al Jazeera English & Al Jazeera America

The secondary desk (a smaller version of the main desk) used to be employed for other AJE Broadcasts, namely Counting the Cost with Kamahl Santamaria.

It was removed a few months ago to coincide with the US Elections, I think, (as someone mentions above) and also to allow a slightly refreshed look for Counting the Cost.

The programme is now hosted from a new pres area that is known as "Kamahl's Kube". It's creation rendered the secondary desk redundant.

I've noticed one news presenter at Al Jazeera English who has an accent very similar to Babita Sharma from the BBC World. I'm not exactly sure what accent that is, but could it be Middle Eastern influenced?

Will Al Jazeera English and Arabic ever unify their look, graphics and music? RT and France 24 does for all their channels.

Supposedly, there was a plan in the works to refresh Al Jazeera English's graphics, but never heard anything of it.
Personally, it works better that they don't. Who knows, maybe it will come eventually especially with Al Jazeera UK and Al Jazeera America to come soon

Yep a certain well known British branding company were producing a new look for the whole Al Jazeera network a few years ago but it hasn't materialised yet.

The thing about AJ is that they don't really need a unified look between Arabic and English channels, very little material is shared between them and they broadcast to different markets/cultures. Of course there is a good reason to do so between channels of shared language (English, America, UK and to a lesser extent Balkans)

AJ English's on screen look is looking a bit dated in places, although with it's orange theme the channel does stand out when compared to it's rivals, they'd be mad to go over to some bland red and blue colour scheme. I've always thought AJ Arabic has looked a lot better though

I don't think Inside Story ever used that desk, did they? What insiders posted in the past was that the secondary desk was intended to be swiveled around so that Inside Story would have a full backdrop of the newsroom, but the idea was nixed before the channel launched, so Inside Story instead used a very believable key of the control room recorded onto a loop.

As I mentioned above, that desk was used for CTC.

The Babita Sharma question above: I've never really found Babita to have a particularly Middle Eastern accent, although she did work in Dubai for many years. I think the AJE anchor you are referring to could well be Sherine Tadros?

It wasn't a chromakey on Inside Story. There were no artifacts associated with keying. The old second desk was right in front of the control room.

It's a question that's been asked many times on here, but does anyone have any idea just how many presenters are in the AJE presenter pool? They would appear to have huge numbers of anchors.

They already had a large presenter pool before cutting Kuala Lumpur and Washington DC completely, so I wonder that myself now that only Doha and London are the main places.

Speculation in Newsweek that AJ America may not be ready this year,

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/05/22/the-al-jazeera-revolution.html?source=socialflow&account=newsweek&medium=twitter

Not entirely a surprise. It's a massive project and there's no way they were going to get a whole new channel up and running from scratch in such a short time. They did the same with AJE too, that was delayed for a long while