We begin Zawia3 on the twenty-fifth of January, and we know that the date has meaning. It is a day that became tied, in the memory of an entire generation, to the idea that change is possible, and the change we want here is specific, small in its appearance and deep in its effect: to change the way we make journalism, and to return to it its first question: what actually happened?
Public talk in our country is confined between two angles with no third: an official narrative that does not tolerate the question, and a mirror image of it that does not tolerate verification. Between the two angles, the facts are lost, and with them the people who lived them.
This is where we chose our name. We are not the angle that supports, nor the angle that opposes, but the angle that asks and investigates, and places what it finds before the reader as it is, so that they judge for themselves.
We are not the angle that supports, nor the angle that opposes, but the angle that asks.
Journalism from this angle will tell people what they need to know, not what they want to know; what officials do behind closed doors, not what they say in front of television screens. That is why we will not chase breaking news, and we will not pursue what tops the screens for an hour and then disappears. We will give the story the time it deserves: we track public money and those who manage it, we search the decisions for who made them and who paid their price, and we open the page to those who find no place for their voices in the media, from workers, detainees and their families to the residents of homes threatened with demolition. And we will publish in Arabic and English, because what happens in Egypt concerns its people first, and concerns the world too.
The idea was not born today. It lived with us for years while we waited: for sufficient funding, for a wider margin of freedom, and for a more suitable time. Then we realised that the right time does not come to those who wait for it, and that an incomplete beginning is more honest than a waiting that never ends. That is why we begin now, from below zero, with limited means and with colleagues who believed in the idea before it became a platform, and with us is our certainty that many readers are still searching for journalism that political money does not write and that power does not dictate.
And because trust is not requested but earned, we bind ourselves to rules that we announce and do not hide: we do not publish what we have not verified, we give everyone we write about the right of reply before publication, we protect our sources, and we correct our mistakes publicly when we make them. And we will not accept support that dictates to us what we write or what we keep silent about. These rules are our Editorial Policy, and every reader has the right to hold us accountable to them.
We know that the road is long, and that our steps will be slower than we wish. But walking slowly from this angle is better than putting our pens aside and leaving the field to those who do not ask. Read us, criticise us, correct us, and if you have a story that deserves to be told, write with us.
Zawia325 January 2023
