Transformations in Egyptian Journalism since the January 25 Revolution

This event is organised by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Followed by a drinks reception.

Egypt’s revolutionary uprising in 2011 raised important questions about the kind of journalism that would be viable in the country’s changing political dynamics.

Suddenly the output of bloggers, online radio and social media news operations, which had all formed part of the groundswell of action against dictatorship and repression, posed an explicit challenge to journalists in state-run and commercial media companies who were more directly subject to government controls.

In this launch event for her new book, Naomi Sakr looks at recent transformations in Egyptian journalism, exploring diverse approaches to converged media and the place of participatory cross-media networks in expanding and developing the country’s body of professional journalists.

Naomi Sakr will present her new book Transformations in Egyptian Journalism: Perspectives on News Work after the January 25 Revolution.

With:

Naomi Sakr, Professor of Media Policy at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster, and Director of the CAMRI Arab Media Centre.

Dr Walter Armbrust, Hourani Fellow and University Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. He is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on popular culture and mass media in the Middle East. He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, and editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Dr Armbrust is currently working on a cultural history of the Egyptian cinema.

Mustafa Menshawy, formerly the Cairo-based BBC Arabic Service correspondent from the beginning of the Egyptian Revolution. He also reported from Libya before the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Menshawy won the Lorenzo Natali Prize for the best worldwide investigative journalism articles in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Kari Blackburn New Talent Award in 2008. He reported from areas far afield such as India and Thailand. He produced two documentaries from the BBC including a controversial one on the Financial Crisis in Dubai. Menshawy is now in London finishing his PhD on cultural claims of collective memory.