Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Participation Working Group

Lina Attalah: Online Spaces: Parallel and Intersecting Realities  

Lina Attalah is the co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr, a progressive and independent news website based in Cairo. She has a decade of reporting experience for such news outlets as Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, the BBC and the Guardian. As a journalist, she has covered the Sinai extensively, and her reporting also took her to cover the Darfur conflict in Sudan, the Gaza Cast Lead operation, the current Syrian civil war and the Iranian 2013 elections among others. She also has strong ties to Cairo’s artistic and cultural community, which she has engaged in cross-sector media collaborations. She co-founded the Take to the Sea art collective and now sits on the board of the Contemporary Image Collective, an independent art space. She also worked in community building and knowledge production around technology and social change; she is the co-founder of the Arab Techies community, is a research affiliate with the Access to Knowledge for Development Centre at the American University in Cairo and is on the board of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation. Most recently she was the chief editor at Egypt Independent and was responsible for building much of the brand, reputation and editorial direction of the newspaper.