Biography | Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani — The Day a Gas Engineer Took the Chair at This Newsroom

On 20 September 2011 Al Jazeera Media Network announced that Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani would become director general.

He took the chair the next day, 21 September, after Wadah Khanfar stepped down from eight years at the top of the network.

The headquarters sit on Ahmed Bin Ali Street in Wadi Al Sail, Doha, the cluster still known locally by the television roundabout.

Khanfar had been a correspondent before he was an executive.

The new director general arrived from Qatargas, a member of the ruling family, with no newsroom pedigree on the public record.

The network's own statement that week listed a petroleum degree from United Arab Emirates University and a joint master's in integrated reservoir project management from Imperial College, the French Petroleum Institute, and Delft University of Technology.

It listed the Qatargas project count.

It did not pretend he had spent the Arab Spring in a control room.

For twenty-one months he ran the group that had grown from a single Arabic channel, launched in 1996, into a multilingual network.

Al Jazeera America was conceived on his watch.

He left the building on 26 June 2013, the day the new emir named him minister of economy and commerce.

The newsroom photograph on Commons was taken from the balcony above the English-language studio on 20 November 2011, two months after he sat down.

The building in Wadi Al Sail is still the public face of the network.

Photo: Wittylama, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons