Russell Merryman

Russell Merryman is the Editor-in-Chief for Web and New Media services at Al Jazeera English.

Russell originally joined the BBC in 1989 as a broadcast journalist and worked in many areas of output as a reporter, producer, presenter, and news editor.

He joined BBC News Online 1 in 2000 to work on their fledgling Interactive TV project, and managed the development of many interactive applications, including the BBC's 24/7 Video News Interactive service, which launched in November 2001 and won the Royal Television Society Award for Technical Innovation in 2002.2

He also worked on Enhanced Television projects for flagship programmes, such as 'Question Time', 'Panorama', 'Vote 2001', 'Vote 2003', 'You the Judge', 'Iraq - Britain Decides', and 'Our Monarchy'; on the BBC's broadband and mobile services for the 2004 Olympics; and on the ground-breaking MPEG-4 Interactive pilot for Newsnight.

Russell has also written and presented papers on advanced interactive content development at leading conferences, including: NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) (Las Vegas, US), Euro-ITV (University of Brighton), Interact-1 (LCC), and KnowledgeLab DK (University of Southern Denmark).

Russell also worked on the Bridge Symposium on Interactivity and Media at London College of Communications: this was held in September 2005, and was the source of this biography.