“You’re not a syndicate member… I won’t gain anything from you if I demand your rights.”
A member of the Journalists Syndicate council said it to me, sitting in his spacious office. I had come to him with a memorandum demanding my dues from the editor-in-chief of a “syndicate” newspaper where I had worked for three years, and then left with no dues and no membership. The newspaper that gives those who work at it their path to the membership card was the one that deprived me of it, and the syndicate to which the newspaper “belongs” told me calmly that I was none of its concern.
It was not the first time I had been thrown out of the profession with a single sentence. Before that, a police brigadier caught me as I was filming a report in Sayeda Nafisa Square, and settled my case in one line: “As long as you’re not a syndicate member, you’re not a journalist, you’re an impersonator.” In the end he released me out of respect for the lady of the shrine. Since that day I have denied being a journalist, and I avoid going near Sayeda Nafisa Square.
The brigadier was not improvising. He was reading from the syndicate’s own logic, in less polite language… and the distance between the council member’s office and the police station’s daily log is far shorter than either side thinks.
Does the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate do justice to those working in online journalism?
A Status Written into the Police Report
“Impersonating a status”… a crime set out in the syndicate’s law. Last August, the head of the Journalists Syndicate, Khaled El-Balshy, filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor against a young woman who claimed, in a quarrel with an “Uber” driver, that she was a journalist. The syndicate’s secretary-general, Gamal Abdel Rahim, explained that what she did constitutes the crime of impersonating a journalist under Articles 65, 103 and 115 of Law No. 76 of 1970, and the evidence he offered was that she is not registered in any of the syndicate’s rolls. The complaint is well founded, and the market is crowded with fictitious entities selling membership cards to whoever pays.
But look at the criterion… registration in the rolls, not what the person does… and this criterion does not distinguish between a young woman brandishing a false status in a quarrel and a journalist filming a report in a public square, or writing a news item from an official police report.
Last January, police arrested Fares Fouad, a journalist at the “Cairo 24” website, at dawn at his home in Agouza. He had published a news item about a kidnapping complaint, relying on an official report at the Bulaq El-Dakrour police station. The Ministry of Interior distinguished in its statement between syndicate and non-syndicate journalists, so the syndicate had to present the prosecution with a certificate proving that he is a “trainee journalist” accredited with it, to ward off the suspicion of impersonation. Fares was released on bail of EGP 5,000 after two days. This is what happened to a journalist the syndicate knows and for whom it holds a paper. As for us, whom it does not know, we have no paper to present to anyone.
Here the whole question changes. The debate about online journalists is usually presented as if it were a debate about privileges: an allowance, medical care and a card. The truth is that the membership we are unable to obtain is what separates a journalist who is asked about the source of his story from a defendant who is asked about his identity.
Nor does this formal criterion protect the profession as it is supposed to. Yehia Qallash, a former head of the Journalists Syndicate, faults successive registration committees for registering editors from “under-the-stairs” newspapers that meet the form without the substance, whose owners game the registration in every committee. The stamped paper opens the door to those who do not know the profession, and closes it to those who practise it every day.
We Are Many
“We are many.” We who have sat for years on the stake of hope, and hope, as you well know, is joining the Journalists Syndicate… We cover crime, the courts and parliament, we write investigations, we edit breaking news in the middle of the night, our names are published above our pieces, and “syndicate” newspapers lift them from us, sometimes without citing the source. Then we read about ourselves in the news as “impersonators“.
The song by Moharram Fouad, “You Didn’t Know How to Love Me”, sums up our relationship with the syndicate… The singer asks, in a voice rising from the bottom of a well: “How, how, how?”, as if leaving the listener the task of finding the reason, then settles the matter at the end: “You didn’t know how to love me.” The syndicate does not love those it calls “impersonators“, and the “impersonators” have not learned to stand at its doors with a bow deep enough for it to take pity on them, so they have remained between a murdered dream and a crumbling hope.
But we have not kept silent, and we did not start complaining yesterday. In December 2018 the Egyptian Observatory for Journalism and Media launched the “Umbrella” campaign to support non-syndicate journalists, and worked on proposals to amend the registration articles. In 2024 journalist Sara Adel launched a group on Facebook demanding the right of those working at online outlets to registration, joined by Mohamed Zakaria and Sara El-Hanafy, and the hashtag “Syndicate membership is the right of online journalists” spread. Eight years of petitions, campaigns and meetings, and the file keeps coming back without being settled.
Mohamed Zakaria says, in his interview with Zawia3 in October 2024, that the registration conditions put the journalist at the mercy of the newspaper’s management, and make him work as forced labour to obtain the registration letter. And he asks how a syndicate can demand rights and change while it is governed by a law from 1970 that ties it to a political organisation that no longer exists.
Whoever Holds the Letter Owns the Journalist
The word “forced labour” reveals what is missing from most of the debate. The knot is not in paper versus screen, but in the route the applicant takes to registration: an employment contract with a newspaper accredited by the syndicate, then a nomination letter from its management. Whoever holds the letter owns the journalist.
Read the definition of the “professional journalist” in the draft new registration bylaws: that he be appointed on an open-ended contract, that he be insured in his capacity as a journalist, and that he not work for another entity. The key to every one of these conditions is held by the employer, not the journalist. Nothing in the definition asks about what the applicant has written, or its quality, or its impact.
From here we understand how editors-in-chief who have mastered nothing but devouring the rights of those who work with them in exchange for pennies succeed. The young journalist accepts the meagre salary, working without insurance, and hours that nobody counts, because at the end of the road he is waiting for a nomination letter that is not free of spelling mistakes. And when he demands his rights, he loses both together: the salary and the letter. That is how I lost my dues and my membership at a single newspaper, and was then told at the syndicate that I am not a syndicate member. I did not become a syndicate member because the newspaper did not want it, and the syndicate did not hold the newspaper to account because I am not a syndicate member. A complete circle with no gap in it. Journalist Maged Atef described this relationship precisely in the same report: registration through a letter from the website’s management is nothing but “replacing one master with another”. He demanded that the journalist apply to the syndicate himself, so that websites do not repeat with their journalists what print newspapers do to those who work for them.
And the door is narrow even by the standards of those who guard it. Ayman Abdel Meguid, a member of the registration committee and one of those who opposed activating the affiliate members’ roll in 2024, acknowledges the right of online journalists to full membership. But he explained that the websites that meet the required conditions, of premises, budget, salaries, insurance and five years of operation, and that 70% of those working at them be syndicate members, do not exceed three news websites. Three websites, in a country where most of its new journalists work online. And the last condition alone is enough to close the circle: for a website’s journalists to enter the syndicate, most of them must already be syndicate members.
The Allowance Before the Principle
Why, then, does the door remain closed? Maged Atef answers without equivocation: many members of the General Assembly fear that online journalists would share the technology allowance with them, or that their entry would lead to its cancellation, especially given journalists’ low salaries. And Eman Ouf, one of the founders of the “Egyptian Women Journalists” initiative, believes the fears are linked to gains, from the allowance to medical care and housing, under pressing economic and political circumstances.
The fear is understandable, and I do not mock it. Whoever lives on a salary that is not enough clings to whatever fills the gap. But the price is paid by an entire generation outside the walls. When opponents of the council’s decision in 2024 collected about 70 signatures against activating the affiliate members’ roll, the roll granted neither an allowance nor privileges. It granted only protection: that the syndicate defend the journalist if he is arrested, and that it negotiate on his behalf with the institution he works for. The protection was rejected out of fear for the allowance, even though the allowance was not on the table.
Then the rejection became electoral merchandise. Journalist Mohamed Mokhtar wrote in September 2025 that the anger of the General Assembly pushed the council to disown the idea, and that the categorical rejection of admitting website editors, whether as affiliates or as regular members, turned into a bidding war in which every candidate pledges to confront it. We do not vote in the syndicate’s elections, so no one loses anything when our heads are offered up to those who do vote.
To be fair, on the other side there is an argument that deserves a response, not mockery. Medhat El-Sheikh writes that not everyone who has written a news item is a professional journalist, and that the syndicate is not an association for absorbing everyone who writes on the internet. This is true, and none of us is demanding a card for everyone who owns a phone and a page. We demand that the journalist be measured by his work, not by his employer’s signature. And the former head of the syndicate, Yehia Qallash, himself believes that the journalistic community is capable of setting clear professional standards that would dispel this concern.
Two Years at a Door That Was Never Opened
On 13 October 2024, the syndicate council decided to activate Article 12 of the law and open applications for registration in the affiliate members’ roll, and formed a committee to draw up bylaws for the roll that would guarantee an umbrella for the profession’s genuine practitioners. Two days later, the head of the registration committee, Hisham Younis, announced that the syndicate was not receiving applications, and that the bylaws would come first.
They did not come. Two years on, no bylaws for the affiliate members’ roll have been published, and not a single journalist from the websites has been admitted through it.
What came instead was a draft of new registration bylaws of 37 articles, put forward in March 2026, which tightens the registration criteria for the newspaper and the journalist. The head of the syndicate, Khaled El-Balshy, himself confirmed that it contains nothing concerning journalists at websites that do not have “coded” print editions. Its twelfth article stipulated that new newspapers wishing to register their editors pay an insurance deposit: EGP 800,000 (about USD 16,563) for a daily newspaper, EGP 600,000 (about USD 12,422) for a weekly, and EGP 250,000 (about USD 5,176) for a monthly publication.
Consider the vocabulary: daily, weekly and monthly. The bylaws written in 2026 still imagine journalism as a newspaper that comes out on a schedule. The news website that publishes every minute has no box in this table, simply because it does not “come out”. No one said websites are banned; the language alone took care of the ban.
Then on 26 April, the council referred the draft to a General Assembly scheduled for March 2027, and formed a committee of senior syndicate members for its final drafting. In August, the syndicate added to the registration conditions rules concerning the wage stated in the contract, insurance, regular payment of salaries, financial inclusion, and a bank statement proving the regularity of the applicant’s salary. On 6 September the council met to discuss regulating membership and purging the rolls. Two full years in which the door was locked from the inside time after time, while the promise to open it remained hanging on a committee whose fate we do not know.
I understand the motives behind these rules; the syndicate wants to close the door to fictitious newspapers and membership brokers, and it has the right to be strict as “reality” programmes spread that have nothing to do with reality or with journalism, but are rather calamities distributed across screens and pages. But each of these rules holds the journalist accountable for his institution’s obligations. The journalist who works for a newspaper owner who evades insurance pays the price twice: once from his salary, and once from his right to membership. And the newspaper owner pays nothing.
A Chamber for Employers Alone
In this scene, the “venting” of Diaa Rashwan, Minister of State for Media, met with an echo that surpassed the cry of Mansour El-Maghazi, “Abbas El-Daw says no”, and rose highest of all among those fishing in troubled waters. On 22 September, the minister met the editors-in-chief of news websites and called on them to establish an institutional entity limited to institutions, excluding individual workers, along the lines of the Chamber of Cinema Industry established in 1947 within the Federation of Egyptian Industries.
The example the minister chose is more telling than he intended. In cinema, the producers have their chamber in the Federation of Industries, and the actors and technicians have their syndicate. In digital journalism, the minister proposes a chamber for the producers, and proposes nothing for those who make the content. Website owners will find someone to speak in their name before the state, and their journalists will remain without a syndicate, a chamber or a status.
That is why the proposal was welcomed by those who sit on the other side of the letter. The editor-in-chief of an economic newspaper posted on Facebook his welcome for the “Rashwanian” plan, describing it as a “happy ending”. The same man threw out journalists who are syndicate members and had worked with him since he launched his newspaper 23 years ago, and some of those who knew him believe he is walking “quietly” in the footsteps of his mentor Emad El-Din Adeeb. And many of those rallying around the minister’s statement are the very people who make journalists drink bitterness.
Writers and journalists took up the proposal with explanation, analysis, criticism, refutation, praise and fanfare, and most of them concluded that “the minister threw a stone into stagnant water”. Almost no one asked where the “impersonators” stand in relation to this stone. And among the cheerleaders are newspaper owners whose employees know well the meaning of the delayed salary and the contract that is never written.
In his poem “Luzum Ma Yalzam”, Naguib Surour wrote of a knight who died searching for heroism, and found nothing on his way but thieves, even those who denounced thieves, and concluded that “the knights of this age are some of the thieves!”. Nearly a century before him, Mahmoud Sami El-Baroudi left a verse that serves as a description of the moment: “And the deadliest of ailments is for the eye to see an oppressor / who does wrong, while his praise is recited in the assemblies”.
Since I heard the minister’s words, I have known, as others know, that it is noise that fills the air and then dissipates, leaving behind nothing but a brief thrill of hope. And the question to which I searched for an answer and found none: does the government under whose umbrella the minister works care about journalists at all, or about those who employ them?
The Law of the United Arab Republic
The law of the Journalists Syndicate has gone 56 years without substantive amendment, while the texts of the constitution change whenever whim pleases. And if the constitution were asked how many amendments it has had, it would answer with the half-verse of Abu Firas al-Hamdani: “Which of them? For they are many!”.
“A syndicate for journalists shall be established in the United Arab Republic.” With this sentence begins the first article of the law issued on 1 September 1970, when Egypt still bore the name of the union state, nine years after Syria’s secession from it. Just 27 days later Gamal Abdel Nasser died, with, as the popular account has it, a few pounds in his safe. Then the name of the state changed, its constitutions were replaced, the honorific “State” returned to precede the prime minister’s name, “His Excellency” and “His Eminence” spread through every speech, and officials took to scolding employees in front of the cameras, whether they were at fault or not. The internet came, and with it came the electronic newspaper, guaranteed by the constitution in its seventieth article and recognised by the law regulating the press and media when it defined a newspaper as a print or electronic publication. And the law stays where it is.
The law states among its objectives the spreading and deepening of “socialist and nationalist thought”, and places the syndicate’s activity within the framework of “the general policy of the Arab Socialist Union”, an organisation dissolved decades ago. And the law does not know that “socialism” has become a charge in investigation reports, nor that the prisons have received many journalists because of what they published.
But the greater paradox is that this aged law is broader than the way it is applied. A few days ago, Khaled El-Balshy said that the law stipulated “printed journalism”, not paper, that it covered news agencies, correspondents from other professions, and Arab and foreign journalists working in Egypt, and that its philosophy when it was issued embraced all practitioners of the profession. In other words, the text by which we are governed did not shut the door in our faces; those who read it shut it.
Nor is this the first time a new generation has knocked on the syndicate’s door. Yehia Qallash recalls that editors of party newspapers faced the same rejection when their newspapers appeared, on the pretext that party work would corrupt syndicate work, and then they got in. And when private newspapers and joint-stock companies came, the uproar was repeated, and so was the question about the moneyed owner who “gets journalists into the syndicate”, and then they got in too. Qallash sums up the lesson in a sentence: “The labour market can’t be in one place and the syndicate in another.” We are the third wave, and the arguments raised in our faces are the very same arguments that have fallen twice.
Who Is a Journalist?
I am an “impersonator” according to the syndicate’s description, and so I put a simple question to the people of the profession: who is a journalist?
The flaw is not in the professional competence of many “impersonators“, but in their legal status. We are not asking for an exception; our file is an exam that the registration system fails year after year.
And the tools for answering the question exist in the syndicate’s own drawers. The draft new registration bylaws provide for an assisting committee of people with journalistic experience to evaluate applicants. This is the tool we need, provided it reads what the journalist has written before it reads his bank statement. The journalist applies to the syndicate himself, not with a letter from his employer. He submits a published archive bearing his name and a documented period of practice, and the committee judges the work, not the paperwork. And the affiliate members’ roll is opened immediately, with published bylaws, as a bridge that grants legal protection until the General Assembly settles the question of full membership. As for the employment contract, insurance and regular salaries, their place is in holding the owners of newspapers and websites to account, by suspending their registration and publicly naming those who evade them, not in depriving those who work for them.
That day, after hearing what I heard from him, I told the council member without hesitation: “This is a newspaper affiliated with the syndicate, sir, and I want my rights from the paper.” Then I added, as hope began to drain out of me: “The newspaper deprived me of the syndicate, and you, sir, are responsible for this file.”
“Thank you for coming, sir,” Mr A.Kh. said, ending the short meeting, and raised his phone to his ear.
I walked out of his office an impersonator, just as I had walked in. And in the street, an entire generation was impersonating the same status: covering, writing, being arrested, being released on bail, then returning the next morning to the work its syndicate does not recognise.
