Ammonnews.net has during the past year become the most read Arabic internet news provider in Jordan. It is probably due to a number of reasons – three of them being that they bring news stories that other Jordanian media not necessarily would publish, that they bring their stories almost in real time and that they allow their readers to comment directly on their news stories, which many do. Ammon is acting as an independent news institution but don’t expect to read stories that could be considered of being harmful to Jordan, the Palestinian cause or Islam.
It also seems that Ammon to a certain extend have been able to gain the confidence of potential sources – not least from officials – and thus broken one of the impediments to a lively press in Jordan which is the perceived general unwillingness to give access to information. This on the other hand requires Ammon to be extra careful in researching and checking facts before publishing their stories – an ability that at least in the beginning was lacking from time to time. It seems to me that as Ammon has gained in popularity they have been (forced to) focusing much more on this in order to increase credibility.
I have known for some time that Ammon News wanted to launch a parallel news website in English. I had expected that the founders Basil Okoor and Samir al-Hiyari would have done that with some publicity – and they might still do – but I have just discovered through a web banner that they opted for a soft launch. This is the URL for the English site: http://en.ammonnews.net/
The English site is not yet fully up to the standard of its Arabic sister and it will of course be an inherent problem that the comments no longer will arrive from the same people or in the same quantity but it will be interesting to follow this latest development on the Jordanian media scene. I know that Okoor and al-Hiyari are very committed to making this a success and that they are trying to allocate the necessary resources to achieve their goal. Congratulation and good luck.
January 10, 2009 at 03:02
Forget about Ammonnews you want the real thing, just look this guy up http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
March 8, 2009 at 16:37
Forget about Ammon. it is an unprofessional news site or web blog should i say that has nothing to do with journalism everything is copy and paste and stolen from other reputable news portals….as for ammon covering jordanian news that kind of defeats the object of utilising the internet