Editorial| Ten years of survival

Great hopes were shattered in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the manner in which it ended, plunging us into a long autumn, a period during which the doors of media institutions slammed shut in the face of independent journalism, their pages no longer able to accommodate a professional news story or an opinion article carrrying the mildest criticism.

That was our motivation for founding an independent platform that puts people, the audience, at the heart of its priorities. A journalistic platform that requires no intermediary; a free space for professional journalists and citizen ones, where anyone can publish without needing prior acquaintance with an editor or staff, without favors and without compromise.

From a small office rented by the founders in the Greek Campus building of the American University in Cairo in 2014, everything began: laying the groundwork for a style guide, understanding and defining the target audience, and finally selecting the site's name from more than a hundred suggestions, and so Al Manassa/The Platform was born.

We dreamed of Al Manassa as an independent organisation that would hold power to account rather than speak on its behalf, and explain consequential decisions to the public rather than justify them. It was thus founded as an independent platform for participatory journalism, bound by nothing but the codes of journalistic ethics, and guided by nothing but the reader's interest.

On Nov. 29, 2015, our website went live for the first time in a pilot broadcast, a simple design carrying grand ambitions. We later completely redesigned it in July 2022, with a modern look and a new visual identity, while retaining our founding motto “A People's Narrative”, to technically accommodate the new services we wished to offer readers.

A year later, we launched our “News & Reports” section in May 2023, promising at the time to deliver news we believed mattered to our readers, crafted with integrity and objectivity, enriched with explanatory backgrounds and illuminating context, and committed not to chasing the scoop but to rigorous, accurate investigation. Today, we hope we have lived up to that promise.

Today, with Al Manassa speaking in two languages, following the launch of our English edition which has now completed its first year, we are able to reach the second generation and beyond of Arab diaspora communities in the West, and to serve as a bridge between Egypt and all those who wish to follow its news, through in-depth stories and journalism from credible sources.

In our earliest days, what we promised was professionalism, not neutrality, seeking clarity amid heaps of hollow phrases and performative gestures.

Yet our greatest achievement across these ten years is simply survival. Amid the tightening grip on public space and the near-disappearance of independent and partisan journalism, we can only regard our continued existence as a deliverance worthy of celebration.

Al Manassa has been blocked thirteen times. Each time, we changed our domain to circumvent the block, and since 2017, our readers in Egypt have no longer been able to access our site through the original (.com) address. Censorship, however, does not always take the form of a blocked URL.

As we write about freedom and accountability, our colleague, cartoonist Ashraf Omar, remains behind bars, held for nearly two years without trial, charged with “financing a terrorist organization” and “assisting a terrorist organization in achieving its objectives.”

Today, as we “celebrate” World Press Freedom Day, we hope that Ashraf will soon celebrate his own freedom, and that he will be the last person imprisoned over cases of conscience. We also hope that our ambitions for the future will extend beyond mere survival.

Because the reader must know, and the conversation must go on.