WASHINGTON, D.C., 7 April 2003 — Every day Arab News receives hundreds of e-mails requesting information about Al-Jazeera, criticizing Al-Jazeera and praising Al-Jazeera. But please, we are not Al-Jazeera!

Is this another case of mistaken identity? Does the New York Times receive daily inquiries about the San Francisco Chronicle?

As an English language daily which presents the news from an Arab perspective to a larger international audience, we nevertheless have to ask ourselves: What are our visitors looking for?

Since the start of the war in Iraq, Arab News Online has significantly increased its viewership. The majority of Internet users who are entering Arab News into search engines such as Google, Lycos and Yahoo are looking for alternative news sources, after waking up to the restrictions of their own domestic news outlets.

Arab News has conducted an in-depth analysis according to statistics of visitor usage of Arab News Online. Since the first day of the war on Iraq, viewer hits have gone up 500 percent, with a daily average of 2,200,000.

The time each visitor spends at the website has also increased significantly, from an average of eight minutes before the war to 13.5 minutes. There has also been a much greater demand for pages showing images from the war, which proves the notion that a picture is sometimes worth a thousands words.

Additionally, the most requested pages were those of articles from our War Correspondents, followed by the Letters and Opinion sections. Not only is there a demand for information about what is happening on the frontlines, but also for a section giving our viewers the opportunity to express what they themselves think about the war. The most surprising find was that not only do our viewers come to hear the Arab voices but that they also came to express their own, whether from the United States, the United Kingdom or New Zealand.

The most common response we receive is that, for varying reasons, people oppose the war. The most common question is: Why didn’t Arab nations do enough to prevent the war in the first place?

To the editors, the most frequently posed question is: Why are there so many different perspectives articulated in our opinion articles and our editorials? This perhaps is the most puzzling for us to deal with, because it is based on the misconception that people have of Arabs, who they think should speak with the same voice because they share a common ideology.