Mada Masr · Cairo · 2014–2017

Lina Attalah seated on a Cairo rooftop, with buildings behind her. — Lina Attalah, Mada Masr’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, in Cairo, September 2017.

Lina Attalah and her newsroom

Portraits of Mada Masr’s journalists, a visit from Belal Fadl, and my work editing Panorama with Rob Stothard.

Mada Masr began in June 2013, founded by journalists who had lost their jobs at Egypt Independent. The publication’s own account describes an independent newsroom working in Arabic and English, with photography, sound and video alongside its written reporting.

I remember an energetic group of dogged reporters with great connections. My relationship with them crossed between photographing the newsroom and working with photographers as an editor of Panorama.

Lina Attalah against a green wall, looking to one side. — 01

I photographed Lina for TIME in September 2017. Jared Malsin’s Next Generation Leaders profile appeared the following month. The same turquoise-wall portrait was used again in Maria Ressa’s TIME100 tribute in 2020.

Lina Attalah sits at a turquoise desk, with colleagues working behind her. — 02

Mada Masr journalists gather around a table of laptops beneath a handwritten wall diagram. — 03

Mada Masr journalists talk around a laptop displaying a photograph in the Cairo newsroom. — 04

Heba Afify works at a laptop among colleagues in Mada Masr’s newsroom. — 05

The four portraits below were published with Leslie T. Chang’s 2015 Guardian profile of Mada Masr.

Dina K. Hussein with folded arms and a patterned scarf against a pale wall. — 06

Heba Afify in a floral sweatshirt against a pale wall. — 07

Amira Salah-Ahmed in a striped top, looking upward against a pale wall. — 08

Maha ElNabawi in a burgundy sweater and long necklace against a pale wall. — 09

Amira Salah-Ahmed and Heba Afify hold mugs and talk with a colleague during a newsroom break. — 10

Two colleagues reach across a newsroom table while another takes a phone call between them. — 11

Belal Fadl at Mada Masr

My photographs of Belal Fadl began as a New York Times assignment with reporter Mayy El-Sheikh. Her 2014 profile, “A Voice of Dissent in Egypt Is Muffled, but Not Silent,” followed the writer’s conflict with the newspaper Al-Shorouk.

On January 30, 2014, I photographed him visiting Mada Masr to talk about journalistic freedom. One of my favorite photographs of him came from that visit.

Belal Fadl seated beneath the words “Tahrir is not a square” in Mada Masr’s newsroom. — 12

Belal Fadl gestures at a table with bread, vegetables and a turquoise cup in Mada Masr’s newsroom. — 13

Editing Panorama

Rob Stothard and I were the original photo editors of Panorama, Mada Masr’s photography platform. We published photo stories mainly by Egyptian and Middle Eastern photographers, working with contributors individually to help shape their stories.

In a June 2014 report to Lina and Rob, I counted 41 photo stories from 26 contributors during roughly seven months on the Mada Masr domain. That was a checkpoint in a longer collaboration.

A Mada Masr editor sits behind a laptop with his cheek resting on one hand, beneath a handwritten wall diagram. — 14

Journalists work and talk around a crowded table of laptops in Mada Masr’s Cairo newsroom. — 15

Mada Masr’s office door with its blue sign and a handwritten note about keeping the puppy inside. — 16

A court order, October 2026

On October 27, 2026, a Cairo court convicted Lina of managing an unlicensed website, fined her EGP3 million and ordered Mada Masr’s closure and the confiscation of its property. The BBC’s later report said she was released after the fine was paid.

The order followed years of pressure, including the blocking of Mada Masr’s website inside Egypt in 2017 and a raid on its newsroom in 2019.

I am especially sad about the threat to their reporting on Sudan in English. For me, its depth and regularity have made it particularly valuable. I fear what readers would lose if that work were silenced.