What remains of January 2011 in the Mada Masr newsroom

In her June 28, 2013, article, “Back to the Margins,” Lina Attalah recounted a late-night attempt to peel a pro-military sticker off her car as she drove past a sit-in at the Ministry of Defense. The sticker called for mass protests on June 30—demonstrations that would soon unseat the Muslim Brotherhood—invoking the same spirit of resistance she had known during the January 2011 uprising.

Attalah’s dilemma reflected the shrinking ground available to those who opposed both camps, at a moment when mobilizing against one faction effectively conscripted support for the other. She concluded that her only choice was to retreat to the margins where revolutionary groups had operated before 2011 and keep working from there. True independence, she realized, meant stepping back from the fever pitch of street mobilization to find a mode of action that still allowed for engagement with unfolding events.

On June 30, 2013, two days after Attalah’s piece appeared, Mada Masr published its first story. Over 13 years later, on Oct. 27, 2026, the New Cairo Misdemeanor Court fined the editor-in-chief 3 million Egyptian pounds (about $55,000) and ordered the website closed for operating without a license. Across the intervening years, the publication carved out a sanctuary for independent journalism amid the systemic dismantling of Egyptian public life and political participation.

During a 2018 panel discussion, the details of which were published the following year, Attalah reflected on the decision to launch Mada Masr before the project was fully baked. At the time, refusing to side with either the Brotherhood or the new authorities was widely dismissed as political apathy, she noted. The team resolved to make its presence felt through careful documentation, particularly as critical events went unreported or were swallowed by a single, dominant narrative. Journalism became their foothold—a way to act when polarization had hardly left any room for participation.

In this context, the Mada Masr experience illustrates how professional expertise and relationships can endure even after the defeat of the political movement that shaped them. While the capacity to mobilize and influence governance may decline, certain actors continue to work together. In that sense, the project connects to the history of the January uprising and its defeat, and to the attempt to preserve the gains and experience of independent initiative and action long after the retreat of the movement that first enabled them to test those possibilities.

A new home for an old practice

The foundation of Mada Masr rested on institutional memory and professional camaraderie built well before the site existed. Most of the founding team had worked together at Egypt Independent, whose publisher abruptly fired the staff in 2013. In an interview later that year with 7iber, Attalah described their mission not as starting from scratch, but as salvaging an editorial tradition that had simply lost its home.

Mada Masr was founded as an attempt to create a new home for this practice, one where journalists could bring everything they had learned together. Had they not joined forces, the team would likely have scattered across different institutions or solo projects. Keeping the collective together demanded capital, resilience, and an appetite for immense risk.

A 2017 study by The Century Foundation documented how some of the founders used portions of their severance pay to launch the project. At that juncture, professional independence required literal skin in the game: investing personal savings to build a platform where they could practice their craft on their own terms.

This founding phase added a new responsibility to the journalists’ workload: learning how to manage a project and secure its resources. The desire to sustain the journalism they knew compelled them to take on operational tasks far beyond producing news and investigations, all to ensure the survival of the space that produced it.

On its “About Us” page, updated in 2019, Mada Masr lists collective ownership and accountability among the core values around which its model is built. This vision directly ties the institution’s independence to its employees’ participation in steering their shared project. Yet, as The Century Foundation study noted, blending collective management with the practical need to resolve disputes and execute daily tasks presented significant challenges. An organization aspiring to strict equality still consists of individuals with varying levels of experience and responsibility, and it must sometimes make decisions that lack consensus.

Knowledge across generations

The expertise accumulated within the institution is transferred either by working alongside veteran editors or through formal training in research, fact-checking and source management. Mada Masr has made training young and aspiring journalists across the country a core part of its mandate. This ensures that those who did not experience the January 2011 uprising can still benefit from this knowledge and learn to practice independent journalism without needing to belong to the founding generation or adopt its specific political identity.

As these newer cohorts apply this knowledge to new subjects and add their own methods of research and writing, the expertise they inherited evolves. In this way, the institution preserves its accumulated knowledge and experience while simultaneously producing journalism that tackles issues not even on the agenda when the site was founded.

Through the transmission and evolution of these skills, the institution maintains its connection to the January uprising. What originated in that historical context becomes available to a new generation of journalists who neither participated in the revolution nor have personal memories of it, yet can draw on its legacy and build on it.

Attalah’s September 2022 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review captured this dynamic. Speaking shortly after state security interrogated her and three colleagues, she described the team’s return to the newsroom and her distinct joy in editing a complex feature on green hydrogen. Revisiting such a topic demonstrated how research, learning and professional mastery persist, despite the prosecutions that constantly drain the time allocated for them.

Defending the project here is fundamentally tied to its capacity to discover new subjects and refine the methods used to cover them. For this work to become a reproducible and teachable practice, a journalist requires colleagues to review their drafts, dedicated time for research and relatively stable relationships with sources.

Naturally, all these conditions are underpinned by the courage required to publish when doing so carries severe consequences. This courage helps transform individual initiative into a sustainable enterprise. From the solidity of these professional relationships emerges the collective ability to produce high-quality journalism and to teach it to those who join the institution later.

The limits of survival

A journalistic institution can expose systemic abuse, but dismantling the structures behind it requires an organized social force. Readers may collectively trust a piece of journalism despite having divergent interests and political stances, but that trust alone does not seamlessly translate into a consensus on shared demands or a readiness to mobilize for them.

Mada Masr has faced constraints that narrow its opportunities for growth and impact, even as it has succeeded in continuing to publish. In the Columbia Journalism Review interview, Attalah described the site as “marginal,” attributing this partly to the internet blocks imposed on it since 2017. She noted the immense time consumed by legal cases and security raids at the expense of editorial development. Defending the institution’s mere existence drains energy that is otherwise needed to expand coverage and reach new audiences.

Under this constant attrition, simply avoiding another loss becomes a victory in itself. The time available to test new subjects, hire more staff or engage a wider readership steadily shrinks. If defending its existence consumes the bulk of the institution’s energy, the effects of political defeat can embed themselves deeply into the rhythm of its daily operations, even as it continues to publish. Romanticizing survival obscures the compounding toll these chokeholds take on editorial ambition.

To stay alive, an outlet inevitably sheds talent and is forced to triage its priorities. The burden of that attrition falls on younger reporters, who must navigate inherited constraints alongside inherited wisdom. The future of any independent newsroom hinges on what its newest members can achieve under shifting pressures, using the tools at hand. Institutional memory can scaffold a new initiative, but it cannot guarantee its safety or write its ending.

The ruptures of closure

The court ruling to shut down Mada Masr threatens the very working relationships that sustain the journalistic project. Halting the institution’s operations and dispersing its staff make resuming their collaboration significantly harder. It also dissipates the delicate trust, built through repeated practice, between reporter, editor and source. Consequently, the impact of the closure severely curtails the team’s ability to produce new knowledge and pass the expertise of this practice on to those who follow.

The abrupt end of the Egypt Independent experiment once forced this team to regroup their expertise within Mada Masr. The recent court ruling now confronts the institution with the threat of yet another rupture, compounding the losses that preceded and accompanied its founding. Rebuilding a dismantled operation consumes time and effort that could have been spent developing the journalism itself, actively delaying the contributions that a new generation of reporters is ready to make.

Defending Mada Masr is ultimately a defense of the right of its current workers and those who will come after them to continue and evolve the experiment. This includes the right to critique its past mistakes and to produce journalism that its founders never did. In 2013, maintaining an independent stance required an institution where journalists could work together. Protecting that institution today guarantees the continuity and evolution of this collective effort, granting those who never lived through the January 2011 uprising the opportunity to build on the expertise forged within it and to create journalism that speaks to their own time.