Al Jazeera Balkans

Well, as far as the two launch presenters are concerned, the male anchor came from the Bosnian public broadcaster, while the female anchor came from the Croatian commercial broadcaster Nova TV.

Here she is anchoring on Nova TV several years ago:



I would say that they are definitely well-known faces in their respective countries, but probably not beyond their borders. AJB is the first truly pan-regional broadcaster to serve the five countries in question (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia), so a well-known face in one country may be almost totally unknown in another.

Ironically, the only face known across the region is the one not seen on air: The news director used to be a famous Yugoslav-era anchor who worked in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, and was Yugoslav television's chief New York correspondent in the 1980s. He pioneered a more modern style at the time, deemphasizing routine politics and focusing more on how other news stories and trends affect ordinary people. Instead of covering UN meetings for days on end, for example, he took his cameras to the streets of New York and told interesdting stories about the city and its people. For people used to a staid Communist news service, this was something fresh and exciting.

Here is a report from Al Jazeera English about the launch of AJB:



By the way, I checked some regional TV forums today, and while the reaction to yesterday's launch was very positive, many people are criticizing AJB's decision to air its own programming only in the evenings for now. The rest of the broadcast day consists of AJE simulcasts.

A better, longer clip of AJB's first newscast (at least the first 17 minutes of it) than the one on the previous page:

Being on air for a few hours a day and working up is better than nothing at all until they can do 24 hours. And of course that's how AJE started, they didn't have news 24 hours a day for a while after launch.

Are they translating the simulcast?

What linguistic standard of Serbo-Croatian are they using? Is it a middle of the road variant?

No.



It's a mix, especially when it comes to text. As far as the spoken word is concerned, reporters and anchors use their native standard, so the anchor may introduce a report using the Croatian standard, with the reporter then proceeding in the Serbian standard. The differences are minor, however -- greater than the difference between British and American English, for example, but not a whole lot greater.

The Cyrillic script is not used at all, since many viewers outside Serbia wouldn't be able to read it.

I haven't seen any reports from Macedonia, so I don't know how they will handle that. Macedonian is a very different language -- much closer to Bulgarian than (what used to be called) Serbo-Croatian.

Language is probably the major reason why Slovenia wasn't included in this project. (Slovenian is also very different and not mutually intelligible with Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian). Another reason may be that, with its strong links to the West and weaker linguistic ties to the rest, Slovenia (much of it geographically in the Alps) tends to see itself as being outside the Balkans area.

From tonight's coverage of Croatia's EU referendum, this is what AJB's Zagreb studio looks like:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v302/az2si/56eea01e.jpg

BTW, this is AJB's main set in Sarajevo:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v302/az2si/fc949f03.jpg

what sort of backgrounds are they? do they change?

The ones in Sarajevo change depending on the story. They're Barcos (or whatever the correct term is) -- the same as Al Jazeera English. In this case, the business anchor was introducing some oil-related story.

You can see more caps showing the Sarajevo set in action on the previous page of this thread (and in the YT clips).

The small set in Zagreb has a static cityscape photo as its background.

AJB is doing a terrific job covering the snow emergency in the region tonight (snow more than three feet high in places, far higher snowdrifts, and whole cities brought to a standstill).

Here is that LIVE YouTube link again:

If you missed tonight's snow coverage, here's a sampler: