There are few media professionals in the Middle East who juggle as many commitments as Daoud Kuttab. Director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, he is also a regular columnist for the Jordan Times and Jerusalem Post. But perhaps his greatest achievement is as founder and chief of the Arab World’s first online community radio station AmmanNet. So what has online radio achieved in Jordan? And where can it go from here? Co-Editor and Publisher of Arab Media & Society finds out.

All the journalists working with Kalima have been persecuted in their family life, in their job and so on. Every member of our team has faced a great many violations of their rights, reveals Sihem Bensedrine in conversation with Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak.

The times, as Bob Dylan sang in another context, are a’ changin’. Across the Middle East, new television stations, radio stations and websites are sprouting like incongruous electronic mushrooms in what was once a media desert, says Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak.

Sitting, as I do, in that strange no-man’s-land between journalism and academia, I am frequently struck by the gap separating theory and reality. That’s true when it comes to Middle East politics—it was, after all, neat theories of democratization disconnected from regional realities that led to Iraq's current woes—and it’s …

The long-anticipated English-language Al Jazeera International (AJI) is due to launch in the second quarter of 2006. TBS’s new senior editor Lawrence Pintak talked with AJI’s managing director Nigel Parsons, to find out about the hopes riding on the new channel as well as the challenges facing it. TBS: Let’s start with some basics. Why are …

In October 2005, more than 500 media development professionals from dozens of countries gathered in Amman, Jordan for the first summit of the Global Forum for Media Development, a new alliance of organizations involved in media training activities around the world.  The location of the gathering was significant: Jordan’s King …

"Anyone who tells you they are not scared silly is lying,” retired Annahar publisher Ghassan Tueni, the living symbol of Lebanese media independence, said in mid-autumn as we sat in his office overlooking Beirut’s port and newly reborn downtown. “We built this glass tower as a symbol of the new Lebanon. Now …

The following article is adapted from Pintak's new book, Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas, published in January 2006 by Pluto Books UK and the University of Michigan Press. Abstract A radical restructuring of the global media landscape and the emergence of information ghettos, in …