This is Democracy Now. I'm Amy Goodman. We're in the Cairo offices of Madamassar, the most

important independent media outlet in Egypt. We're here just after the UN climate summit.

It really is a large apartment where so many independent journalists have come through.

It is the place where the prisoner Al-Abda Fatah has published many of his writings.

We're joined right now by Lena Atala. She is the founding editor of Madamassar has been

through so much over this last. Well, it's almost a decade. Been detained, been arrested.

These offices have been raided. Hi, Lena, it's so great to be with you, Finlay. I've met

you in the United States. We've interviewed you. But to be here in your offices makes an

enormous difference to have this sense of place. What does Madamassar mean? So, Madda is

like the horizon and Massa means Egypt. So, basically, when we started back in 2013, it was

a way to still have some sort of a forward-looking vision for this country through the work that

we've known how to do for years, which is journalism. So, that's why it's called that.

What was it about 2013? So, we started in the summer of 2013 as a group of founding editors

and journalists, about 24 people. We were working together in another newspaper that had to

shut down the management back then, cited some financial hurdles, but also political

divergences between us. It was a very apocalyptic summer. The country was heading towards a major

political transformation as marked by the coup, the takeover of a military government and the

ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government. We had a very strong intuition that it's going

to be a hard time, not just for us as journalists, but for the Egyptians by and large, specifically

anyone who's engaged in politics, in civic action. We thought that it was important to create a

locality conceived record of this moment by starting this media. So, that was the reason. It was

an intuition that things are going bad. We need to create a record for it and maybe also have

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