“Journalism is not this heroic mission of this one investigative journalist or this fantastic editor. It has to be the work of many people creating knowledge together.”
The MERIP Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
She had just explained how a group of journalists from a closed Egyptian paper started Mada Masr in 2013. This is the lesson she says the newsroom learned over a decade of working under pressure, now that a court has ordered the outlet closed.
Transcript
It's great to be with you, and it's an honor to be in Lina's company.
…into it. Lena, I want us to maybe start off by grounding our listeners a little bit. Tell us, in brief, how do you view Mada Masr journey? Like, where has it come from? What's driven your mission over the last decade plus running things there? And then, how have things been in more recent years?
…this last decade. It involves, the journey involves some very strong journalism that kept coming together despite all odds, despite the massive stifling of public space. But it happened to be an attract point of attraction, a point of gravitation for everyone who's interested in doing independent journalism. It became a site of collective intelligence. So it's the place where we learned that journalism is not this heroic mission of this one investigative journalist or this fantastic editor. It has to be the work of many people creating knowledge together. So it became a knowledge model with time. And in parallel to all of this, it became an experiment in organizing in institutional building because how can you sustain this journalism, especially in these hostile circumstances? You need an institution that's learning with time how to be sustainable politically, economically, how to be, like we always like to say, an ecology of care, because it's…
Yeah, no, I absolutely want to underline that point because I think it's not recognized enough in the West how much how creative journalistic and media outlets in Egypt, but elsewhere in the region as well, I should say, have been in responding to authoritarian repression and have really kind of…
I mean, to just give a bit of context, in 2018, the country, Egypt, passed The first media regulation law that would organize the work of media websites. Before that, there wasn't really a regulating regulating law. And even though it's a law that we were critical of for many reasons in terms of…
Yeah, that's absolutely true. I'm going to hand things to Hisham here for a second, but I just want to say, Lina, I think it's just so important that you're documenting this process. As it goes along, testing this authoritarian system through the rules of the game that it sets out for itself…