New Online Journal: Arab Media & Society

My colleagues at the American University in Cairo made the following announcement today:

Arab Media & Society Launched

Online journal will cover changing media, political and cultural landscape

The Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo and the Centre for Middle East Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, are pleased to announce the launch of their new electronic journal Arab Media & Society at www.arabmediasociety.org.
The online publication is the successor to the highly-regarded Transnational Broadcasting Studies (www.tbsjournal.com), which has been covering satellite broadcasting in the Middle East and broader Muslim world for the past decade.
The move is recognition of the changing nature of the Arab media and social landscape.
“When TBS Journal was founded two years after the launch of Al Jazeera, satellite TV was the story. Newspapers were moribund. Internet penetration was negligible. Media deregulation was an alien concept,” publisher and co-editor Lawrence Pintak writes in the first issue. “The impact of the pan-Arab satellite revolution is today felt at every level of Arab society – and in every form of media.”

The journal will publish quarterly with frequent updates of timely articles from scholars, researchers and journalists.
“The Arab media scene and Arab society as a whole are changing rapidly. The shift from a combination of print and online to a pure online approach means we are able to offer thoughtful insights into developments as they occur, produce more frequent thematic issues, and include a mix of interactive features,” Pintak says in his column.

For example, the first issue includes:

• A package of six stories on blogging in the Arab world, led by an article from Marc Lynch of Williams College, accompanied by an interview with two Egyptian bloggers in a streaming audio format.
• A set of articles on last summer’s Lebanon war, including a piece on women war correspondents by Magda Abu-Fadil and an article by Paul Cochrane on how Hizbullah’s al-Manar managed to stay on the air
• Print interviews with the head of the BBC’s new Arabic news channel and a Tunisian online magazine editor, along with an audio interview with Daoud Kuttab, who is pioneering community radio in the Arab world
• A piece on the fate of US government broadcasting by former official of VOA Alan Heil, Jr.
• Interactive book reviews that invite reader comment and debate
• And much more

The site also contains real-time summaries of the Arab media, resources such as major reports on the development of Arab media, and links to a variety of other interesting content.

For further information or to discuss writing for the journal, contact Managing Editor George Weyman at ams@aucegypt.edu.