The Middle East is constantly evolving. So, too, Arab Media & Society. With this issue, I am handing over the publisher/co-editor reins to Hafez Mirazi, the new interim director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research.

Social media had been expanding in waves across Egypt. But then came the April 6th showdown between the Facebook activists and the Egyptian government and Egypt’s electronic revolution may have crossed a critical point. David M. Faris explains.

Blogging has intensified political trends first triggered by the birth of satellite television and an independent print press but does not mark a new departure for Egyptian politics, argues Tom Isherwood.

This volume is a welcome start to the long-overdue project of challenging stereotypes of the Gulf as a backward, tribal culture that has been overwhelmed by global cosmopolitanism, argues Reviews Editor Samer Abboud.

A Mickey Mouse lookalike character on Hamas’s al-Aqsa network generated a storm of controversy in Western media in 2007 – but were Palestinian kids actually tuning in? Yael Warshel surveys television viewing among Palestinian youth.

Is the Egyptian government using new Salafi stations to counter the more politically active Muslim Brotherhood? Nathan Field and Ahmed Hamam on the growing popularity of ultra-conservative religious programming.

Although the book is poorly rendered into English, Gertz and Khleifi offer an insightful look into Palestinian film and draw an important link between art and politics in Palestinian society, says Sonia Rosen.

The Yemeni government’s refusal to let journalists and foreign observers into the Sa‘ada governorate has helped prolong and intensify the stop-go fighting that has plagued Yemen’s mountainous north since 2004, argues Maysaa Shuja al-Deen.

The strikes in Egypt held on 6 April 2008 had mixed results – but you wouldn’t know that from reading the country’s main papers. Aaron Reese analyzes how the Egyptian press framed coverage for and against the protesters.

While somewhat limited in locating middle class youth within Iranian society, Varzi’s brilliant work interrogates the relationship between ethnography and processes of fictionalization, writes Jennifer Riggan.