Miriam Berger reports on change and stagnation at the Egyptian Journalist Syndicate, Egypt’s only official journalist union. Through interviews with syndicate members and media observers, she paints a granular picture of how efforts to reform the syndicate remain blocked by entrenched political, economic and state interests.

At a time when Hollywood movies are a global commodity, Mohamed Satti studies the extent of their impact on cinema and television in Kuwait. He shows that while American films dominate the movie theaters, local production of television content continues to be strong.

Matt Duffy reflects on the state of journalism education in the United Arab Emirates before and after the Arab spring. His experience as a communications professor at Zayed University, followed by his unexplained expulsion from the UAE, reaffirms the increasingly bleak environment for media freedoms in the region.

Nabil Dajani critiques the perception that Lebanon enjoys one of the freest media systems in the Arab world, showing how its foundations in confessional politics and business interests prevent it from functioning as a public service, a control on power, or a voice for the voiceless.

Naomi Sakr’s survey of the state of post-revolution Egyptian journalism shows how, in spite of notable advances, it is still beholden to Mubarak-era strictures and practices. Mohammed el-Nawawy calls the book timely and valuable as a snapshot of a transformed but still evolving situation.

Egypt’s broadcast media is widely seen as unruly and in need of regulation, with the rights and responsibilities of journalists still unclear two years after the revolution. Mark Visonà reports on the recommendations of a recent conference, hosted by the American University of Cairo, on how to build a regulatory framework. The conference, “Egypt and International Models of Broadcast Regulation and Accountability,” featured guest speakers from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the United States, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco.

Amy Kallander delves into the world of Tunisia’s educated and upper-middle class bloggers to reveal a more nuanced picture of their role in the Tunisian revolution. Reviewing the country’s unique history of Internet activism and government censorship, she finds that their impact was not only more limited than western media accounts claimed, but in many ways, more interesting.

Focusing on the role of social media as a tool for both framing and offline organizing, Felix Tusa compares the Iranian election protests of 2009 with those of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Unlike Egyptian netizens, Iranians engaged in far less framing and over-relied on social media for organizational purposes, thus partially contributing to the failure of their movement.

Well before social media’s celebrated role in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, Mohamed Ben Moussa argues, the Internet was shaping collective action and political advocacy in Muslim-majority societies in important ways. Looking at Moroccan social movements’ framing of the 2009 Gaza war online, Ben Moussa details how the use of the Internet shapes their structure, boundaries and mobilization capacity.

In one of the first studies of Egypt’s Rassd News Network (RNN), Yomna Elsayed explores how this Facebook-based citizen journalism network became the most influential news source during the revolution. Placing RNN in the context of alternative media launched on social networks, she explores the reasons for its success as well as the challenges that it faces.