Blogs: Arab Media Conference at LMEI

We are pleased to announce that the Arab Media Conference held on the 16^th of March at LMEI and sponsored by the Media Outreach Center of the U.S. Embassy in London and the MBI Al Jaber Foundation was such a resounding success that it has been widely discussed in the blogosphere.

We’ve posted a few excerpts from blogs on the conference and its panel sessions to share with our readers…  

Please feel free to email us at info@mbifoundation.com with any blogs, posts or articles.

SOAS Arab Media Conference

Tue, 03/17/2009 - 4:23am

As I sit in a Heathrow waiting lounge, a belated welcome to my friend Brian Katulis, who will be guest-posting from the UAE and Kuwait this week.  I've just finished a fascinating conference on the Arab media at SOAS, which was a particularly interesting experience after a few days at the Al-Jazeera forum. Khaled al-Shami, media columnist for al-Quds al-Arabi and more recently of the independent Egyptian al-Hewar TV, nicely captured one theme of debate with his remark that there is too much politics in the Arab media, and too much media in Arab politics.  Read more on Marc Lynch's blog here   

Arab Media Today @ SOAS

Published March 18, 2009 Egypt 

I am just back from a quick trip to London to speak at a conference organized by the London Middle East Institute, which is part of  SOAS.  Check out Marc Lynch’s roundup here.  My talk was an expansion of my article from the last Arab Media & Society on social media in the Gaza conflict.  I expanded it a bit to talk about the larger uptake of Facebook in the Arab world, particularly Egypt.  A few people have asked me for my paper (which I haven’t actually written yet) but I did clean up my presentation notes a bit. 

Read the notes and more on Friday in Cairo, a blog by Will Ward 

Blogging and social networking dominate conference on Arab media

By Susannah Tarbush

A ONE-day conference on new Arab media held in the Brunei Gallery of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) last week gave the audience the opportunity of hearing from some of the leading bloggers in the Arab world in person.  

They included the Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas, who blogs at Misr Digital; Ali Abdulemam, described by the New York Times as Bahrain’s “most notorious blogger”, and Tunisian investigative journalist and human rights campaigner Olfa Jami. There were two Jordanian bloggers: Naseem Tarawneh, author of the “Black Iris” blog, and Mariam Abu Adas who started her “Driven by Curiosity” blog in 2004 when she was living in Saudi Arabia. Tarawneh was a co-founder of the Jordanian citizen media site 7iber.com which Abu Adas now runs. 

Titled “Arab Media Today: new audiences and new technologies”, the conference was organized by the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) at SOAS. It was supported by the Media Outreach Center of the U.S. Embassy in London and the MBI Foundation of Jeddah-based businessman and philanthropist Mohamed Bin Issa Al-Jaber. Read more on Susannah's blog the tanjara