There are few media professionals in the Middle East who juggle as many commitments as Daoud Kuttab. Director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, he is also a regular columnist for the Jordan Times and Jerusalem Post. But perhaps his greatest achievement is as founder and chief of the Arab World’s first online community radio station AmmanNet. So what has online radio achieved in Jordan? And where can it go from here? Co-Editor and Publisher of Arab Media & Society finds out.

All the journalists working with Kalima have been persecuted in their family life, in their job and so on. Every member of our team has faced a great many violations of their rights, reveals Sihem Bensedrine in conversation with Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak.

We are hardly ever innocent bystanders to conflict. Merely with their presence journalists influence the parties they report on, so we are participants rather than bystanders. And our choice of what to report and how always serves certain power interests, argues Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk.

There are several reasons why the new Democratic 110th Congress, the Bush administration, or both need to take a hard, new look at the American networks without delay, says Alan L. Heil Jr.

The times, as Bob Dylan sang in another context, are a’ changin’. Across the Middle East, new television stations, radio stations and websites are sprouting like incongruous electronic mushrooms in what was once a media desert, says Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak.

Through the 2006 summer war in Lebanon, blogging provided an outlet for Arabs in America to vent their frustrations, anxieties and criticisms of events. It also gave many a sense of reconnecting with other Arabs around the Diaspora, says Vivian Salama.

Paul Cochrane tracks Israel’s attempts to strike a lethal blow to Hizbullah’s satellite channel.

In all previous Arab-Israeli wars Israel had dominated on all counts. But in the 2006 war, the influence of the Israeli media on global opinion seemed to have been tempered by the greater range of Arab voices, argues Jihad Fakhreddine.

Lebanese women journalists braved bombs, bullets and missiles to report the conflict between Hizbullah and Israel in the summer of 2006, sometimes surpassing their male colleagues’ coverage by providing insight into the conflict’s human nature, says Magda Abu-Fadil.

When Bahrain Online founder Ali Abdulemam and his partners were arrested in February 2005 for hosting a critical United Nations human-rights report about Bahrain, fittingly enough the first to respond were colleagues in the Bahraini blogosphere, reports Luke Schleusener.