I'lam Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel

I'lam Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel is a non-profit Palestinian media NGO based in Nazareth devoted to raising awareness and educating Palestinian society in Israel in media practices. "It also seeks to democratize media policies and practices within the local Arab and Hebrew language medias, towards the realization of media rights in Palestinian society." --website

The site's Publications section includes reports from 2005 to the present.  Titles from the last couple years (available for download) include:

The Challenges to Journalistic Professionalisim: Between Independence and Difficult Work Conditions, by Amal Jamal and Rana Awaisi (2012).

Arab Reporters Needed for the Hebew Press: Patterns of representing Arab-Palestinian Citizens in Israeli Print Media, by Amal Jamal and Kholod Massalha (2011).

The Marginality of Human Rights in the Israeli Media, by Dr. Amal Jamal and Samah Bsou (2012).

The Discourse of Human Rights in the Israeli Media, by Dr.Amal Jamal and Kholod Masalha (2012).

Polity's Global Media and Communication Series

Polity Press has just published (2011) three excellent overviews of media systems and policy abroad.

European media : structures, policies and identity / Stylianos Papathanassopoulos and Ralph Negrine.

Indian media : global approaches / Adrian Athique.

Arab media : globalization and emerging media industries / Noha Mellor, Muhammad Ayish, Nabil Dajani, and Khali Rinnawi.

All three books are aimed at both students without prior knowledge of the media landscape of these areas as well as more seasoned readers who want to make sure they have good perspective on the the whole picture. These books are interdisciplinary and combine facts with theoretical insight.

All three titles are available at both Annenberg Reference and Van Pelt.

Middle East and Islamic Resources from CRL

The latest issue of the Center for Research Libraries' online publication, Focus on Global Resources, features Middle East and Islamic scholarly source material available from CRL. Articles showcase research using Turkish newspapers, recent efforts to document the "Arab Spring" revolution, and how new technologies, specifically Archive-It, a web-crawling utility, are being used to capture the Middle East web.

CRL is an international consortium of research libraries that jointly collects and preserves newspapers, journals, and other archive materials. A large percentage of their acquisitions are from outside the United States, with major emphasis on the developing world. Member institutions provide students, faculty, and other researchers access to the collection through Interlibrary Loan and electronic delivery.

CyberOrient

It's a good time to be reading CyberOrient, a open access, peer-reviewed online journal of the virtual Middle East. Started in 2006, the journal is sponsored by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and based at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. In the words of journal Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Martin Varisco:

The main purpose of this electronic journal is to provide a forum to explore cyberspace both as an imaginary forum in which only representation exists and as a technology that is fundamentally altering human interaction and communication. The next generation will take e-mail, websites and instant availability via cell-phones as basic human rights. Internet cafes may someday rival fast-food restaurants and no doubt will profitably merge together in due time. Yet, despite the advances in communication technology real people in the part of the world once called an “Orient” are still the victims of stereotypes and prejudicial reporting. Their world is getting more and more wired, so cyberspace becomes the latest battleground for the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

The current issue features: The Islam-Online Crisis: A Battle of Wasatiyya vs. Salafi Ideologies?; Overcoming the Digital Divide: The Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia; Beyond the Traditional-Modern Binary: Faith and Identity in Muslim Women’s Online Matchmaking Profiles; New Media and Social-political Change in Iran; e-Islam: the Spanish Public Virtual Sphere, and a book review of Vit Sissler's Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Discourses in Cyberspace.

Arab Media Outlook

The Dubai Press club has just released its third Arab Media Outlook edition, Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013: Inspiring Local Content. AMO is a media development initiative of the Dubai Press Club; others includes the Arab Media Forum and the Arab Journalism Award. The 199-page Report assesses the region's media landscape, aiming to" build a knowlege-base on the media for the media for the benefit of industry stakeholders, policy makers, media scholars, students and the general public."

The report this year is far more exhaustive in its scope and reach than the previous editions and is backed for the first time, by extensive market research in four significant media markets in the region, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon on shifting media consumption habits. We have expanded the coverage of the report to include 15 Arab countries, namely, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, the UAE and the Yemen.

The last edition of the report came out soon after the onset of the global financial crisis, leaving out little scope for incorporating a detailed analysis of its impact on the media industry. We have tried to more than compensate for that in the present edition, providing a much more focused assessment of the media industry against the backdrop of the financial meltdown. The impact of the crisis, needless to say, varies from country to country, depending on the extent to which each market is exposed to global markets. The country-wise assessment given in the report takes into
account the specificities of each market covered.
--Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996

Penn Libraries has just added to its e-resource page the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996 for the regions of the Middle East & Africa, Near East & South Asia and Africa (Sub-Saharan) & South Asia. "The original mission of the FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. Many of these materials are first-hand reports of events as they occurred." (from the Readex overview page). This fully searchable archive of scanned transcripts from the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence has been recently digitized from the microfiche. Other regions of the world such as China, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe are available at Penn, but only in microfiche. You can use the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Electronic Index (1975-1996) to access the microfiche for these other regions, not ideal, but a step up from the paper indexes that we used to rely on.

Special Issues Roundup

Camera Obscura (Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies) is devoting two issues to Divas. Fabulous! Divas, Part I (Number 65, 2007) features divas of the screen, musical theater, soap opera and the life and times of Josephine Baker with tributes to Judy Garland, Grace Jones, Sylvester, Julie Andrews, Courtney Love, Isabelle Hubbert, and Angela Lansbury. Stay tuned for Part II (next issue).

Index on Censorship (Volume 36, Number 3, 2007) has a special 82-page section on Reporting the Middle East From Frontline Journalism to Reportage: How the Region Looks from the Inside.

afterimage has an Art & Activism Special Issue (Volume 34, Numbers 1 & 2) including the article "Tactical Media and the End of the End of History" which defines tactical media as "situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular sociopolitical context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that will contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture." Other articles address global media ecology and documentaries that promote media activism.

EME (Explorations in Media Ecology) honors founding father of media ecology, Neil Postman, in its Volume 5, Number 1, 2006 issue. Leading off the issue is the keynote address delivered by Postman to the Speech Communication Association in 1973 where he discussed the new graduate program in media ecology he had just launched at NYU's School of Education.

Journalism Studies (Volume 8, Number 5, October 2007) looks at Cartooning America Post-World War II. Most of the articles in the issue were originally presented at a conference titled "Cartooning the USA: America Through the Pen of Political Cartoonists" held at the British Library in 2005 and organized by Phillip Davies who serves as the issue's guest editor.

Mideastwire.com

Just added to the Penn Libraries E-Resource collection: Mideastwire.com.

Mideastwire.com is an Internet-based news service that employs a team of translators around the region to gather important stories from and about the Middle East. Established in Beirut, Lebanon, it began offering services to paying clients in September 2005. It currently covers news from all 22 Arab countries, Iran, and the Arab media diaspora generally to span across the North Africa region as well as the UK and other countries that host Pan-Arab media.

An archive, which already contains thousands of briefs coded by subject categories (women, judicial, energy etc), specific news sources (Al Hayat, Al Jazeera, Al Quds Al Arabi etc), countries, general topics (opinion, business etc.) and keywords, is fully searchable.

For subscription access, be sure to enter this resource from the Penn Libraries homepage.

Media Sustainability Indexes from IREX

IREX currently publishes two indexes on the conditions for independent media to thrive in 38 countries across Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Since 2000 it has focused on Eurasian MSI but since 2006 it has taken on the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, an MSI for Africa is due out this year. The MSI is designed to analyze key elements of each country’s media system and highlight where intervention can be most effective in promoting sustainable and professional media systems.

MSI Europe & Eurasia 2006/07, the sixth MSI for this region, focuses on 21 countries.
MSI Middle East and North Africa (MENA) analyzes 18 countries in the region. Both are available in full online.

IREX (International Research and Exchange Board), is an international nonprofit organization that describes its mission as "providing leadership and innovative programs to improve the quality of education, strengthen independent media, and foster pluralistic civil society development."

Tooling around the site I also ran into this: The Internet in Russia: On The Eve of Great Changes, an IREX Internet project for Russia that chronicles the dramatic changes in the growth of the Internet in Russia from 1990-1999. This online history includes information collected from more than 200 sources and site addresses of leading commercial, educational, and noncommercial organizations. As explained at the IREX site, "Vast distances, compounded by the deteriorating infrastructure of existing mail, telephone, fax, and other traditional means of communication, make the Internet an ideal medium to overcome the historical isolation of Soviet scholars, students, and business people and increase communication among the emerging civil society."

Iran's PressTV

PRESS TV is the first international Iran-based news network to broadcast in English on a round-the-clock schedule. Based in Tehran and state-run, it is staffed by media professionals from around the world. On the website it describes its goal as "to present a deeper analysis of current affairs, aiming to show the other side of the story. " It goes on to describe its larger vision as threefold: "to break the global media stranglehold of western outlets, to bridge cultural divisions pragmatically, and (three) to highlight the versatility and vitality of political and cultural differences, making up the human condition." The site features news articles and the opportunity to watch live coverage.

Arabic Media Center at Emory

The Arabic Media Center--established in March of 2007 by Emory University’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies(MESAS) in conjunction with the Journalism Program--plans to give journalists, scholars, diplomats and leaders of non-governmental organizations the tools to explore perspectives and attitudes of the Arab world that are not always readily apparent. Bonn-based Media Tenor, a media institute in the field of applied agenda-setting research which provides detailed analyses of news reports and strategic media intelligence to major corporations and government agencies (such as the U.S. State Department), is donating the core material for the Center - an analyzable, regularly updated database of Arabic electronic and print media to use for research and training. Members of the Emory community and other scholars and students will be afforded access to the database.

Professor Gordon Newby, chair of MESAS, will serve as the Center's director and will work with Media Tenor CEO Roland Schatz to create programs and opportunities to link the Arabic print and broadcast media to the Arabic and English-speaking worlds. Schatz founded Media Tenor in 1993 as the first research institute to focus on continuous media analysis.

The Media Tenor Research Journal is available (2003-present) in the Annenberg Library.