A month after the launch of Sky News Arabia, Arab Media and Society editorial board member S. Abdallah Schleifer talked to general manager Nart Bouran about his vision for the new channel, its ownership, the saturated field of pan-Arab television and the future of local television channels.

Ramy Aly reviews and critiques this volume of articles edited by Tariq Sabry, calling it the most coherent attempt yet to “create a reflexive disciplinary self-consciousness” for the nascent field of Arab cultural studies. The book’s strength, he writes, lies in its “unapologetic diagnosis of the weaknesses” of current Arab media, communication and literary studies and its proposals for a way out of this disciplinary impasse.

Daoud Kuttab explores the resistance to community radio in the Arab world despite the opening up of media sectors following the Arab uprisings. He calls on the region’s newly elected leaders to welcome the developmental potential of community-based radio and to create the necessary regulatory framework for radio broadcasting.

Reviewing the role of new media in the Arab uprisings, Wiebke Lamer considers both its potential and its limitations in undermining authoritarian regimes. She concludes that over the long term, new media’s greatest impact may be in strengthening civil society and facilitating non-state actors.

In the first survey of its kind, Mohammed el-Nawawy and Catherine Strong study job satisfaction among journalists working for Al-Arabiya TV. They explore how the channel’s Saudi ownership and coverage of the Arab uprisings shape perceptions of editorial freedom, job security and job satisfaction, pointing to a new understanding of journalism values among news workers at pan-Arab satellite channels.

Salah Al-Nasrawi reflects on the hiring practices and work conditions of native Arab reporters employed by international media organizations with offices in the Middle East. He exposes an unregulated and often inequitable environment that stifles the development of local Arab journalism and he calls for a public debate on the issue.

Arab Media & Society editorial board members remember the life and career of journalist Anthony Shadid
The Daily Star editor-at-large Rami Khouri writes that Shadid’s gift was the blending of his craft and his conscience, his profession and his person.  CSIS Middle East Program Director Jon Alterman traces the career of a friend whose life and reporting embraced ambiguity and complexity.

Issue 15, spring 2012 https://doi.org/10.70090/RK12ASCC The many deserved accolades and tributes to the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid after his death in February were moving testaments to his life and work.[1] It was hard to count the many ways in which his friends and colleagues—and thousands of readers …

I met him before he was Anthony Shadid. In the summer of 1991, he was just a skinny kid from the University of Wisconsin with a black mustache and an easy smile. We were studying Arabic together in Cairo. He was a third-generation Lebanese-American who had learned Arabic from scratch …

Television producer Mohamed Nasser calls Egypt’s privately owned satellite channels a threat to the goals of the revolution and little better than their state-owned counterparts. He proposes a series of reforms, including legislation to separate ownership and management.