It has been confirmed to Klix.ba that after fourteen years of successful work in the Balkans, the regional television project Al Jazeera Balkans is being shut down.
Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB) is the regional arm of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network, headquartered in Sarajevo and launched on 11 November 2011. Broadcast in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, North Macedonia and even among diaspora, AJB features a mix of locally produced news, documentaries, live debates, business, tech, and sports, supplemented by Al Jazeera English feeds.
In the past 14 years, Al Jazeera Balkans has been particularly recognizable for its original content related to the documentary segment, but also a number of other projects. It is the first television station to broadcast a program in a language other than Arabic and English.
Al Jazeera Balkans has been present in Sarajevo since mid-September 2010, when it bought the local TV station NTV Studio 99 from the company “PEP” owned by Adil Kulenović for 2.3 million BAM, which was the amount of that TV station’s debts to the state.
In 2018, Al Jazeera Balkans established AJB DOC, a documentary film festival, which takes place in Sarajevo every September. The reasons for the closure have not yet been announced, but it is assumed that it was a business decision by Doha due to financial reasons.
