Egyptian Women Journalists’ Feminist Voices in a Shifting Digitalized Journalistic Field

Abstract

This qualitative feminist study analyzes Egyptian women journalists’ articulations of their shifting roles, struggles, and resistances to the political, legal, socio-economic, and professional challenges in a shifting, hybrid, and digitalized journalistic field. Through analyzing 16 interviews with women journalists representing different media affiliations, experiences, and demographics, this study explores their varied perceptions of the shifts in journalistic professionalism and press freedom in Egypt, their equally shifting professional roles and struggles, and their varied resistance mechanisms. On the one hand, this study unpacks the multiple challenges facing them, such as restricted journalistic autonomy, limited access to information and technology, sexual harassment, lack of job security, and other forms of professional discrimination, in a male-dominated profession and a patriarchal culture. On the other hand, it investigates the parallel resistance mechanisms they deploy to overcome these challenges. We argue that the amalgamation of these cyclical, push-and-pull dynamics gave birth to a new “differentiated media landscape” (Schroeder 2018), representing a third space between mainstream media and citizen journalism, the online and the offline, and the old and the new, in a rapidly evolving journalistic field.

Keywords:

• Egyptian journalists
• women journalists
• digital capital
• gendered capital
• digitalization
• hybridization
• feminist journalism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to the editorial team of the journal Digital Journalism for all their help and support throughout the process of publishing this article, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments, which strengthened this article. The authors are also thankful to Dr. Linda Steiner, Professor of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, for her useful feedback on an earlier draft of this article, and to Mr. Fielding Montgomery, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park, for his helpful editorial revisions. Last, but certainly not least, the authors are deeply grateful and indebted to the brave Egyptian women journalists who agreed to share their views and voices through this article. This research study wouldn’t have been possible without them.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.