Cable channel Al Jazeera America, which launched less than a year ago, is slashing expenses and laying off staff as it struggles to gain a foothold in the US.
The news outfit is letting go of scores of staffers after its Mideast backers spent millions getting the channel off the ground, according to sources close to the company.
“They’re not making their numbers or the revenue they thought,” said a source. “They have a really convoluted background of people in from Qatar [headquarters]. They really don’t get the US market.”
Al Jazeera America is averaging just 15,000 total viewers, roughly half those who tuned in to its predecessor, Current TV, according to Nielsen figures.
The channel draws fewer than 6,000 viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old target audience for news.
Thanks to the deep pockets of the owners, Al Jazeera America spent freely in a bid to challenge its all-news TV competition.
It hired 800 journalists, including former ABC news-gathering chief Kate O’Brian, and blanketed the US with a dozen bureaus.
In a memo to staff on Friday, O’Brian suggested that the channel was scaling back after the initial rush to hire.
“Now it is time to set our sights on new goals, requiring different levels and areas of investment and resources,” she wrote in the memo obtained by The Post.
She continued: “We have reached what I will call our steady-state level of operations and we are bringing our staffing levels into alignment with our long-range plan as per our original business case.
“As a result, certain parts of our organization will expand or contract and staff levels and resources will be re-calibrated.”
The network’s financial backer, the government of Qatar, paid a hefty $500 million in January to purchase Current TV and gain US distribution.