Wael Abbas

Blogger, Misr Digital, Egypt
Knight International Journalism Awardee 2007

Abbas is the first blogger to win the Knight International Journalism Award. His blog, Misr Digital (Egyptian Awareness,) regularly breaks stories on subjects generally avoided by local media, such as protests, corruption, and police brutality. His vivid first-hand reports, videos and photographs have attracted thousands of readers and the attention of mainstream news outlets, which have begun to pick up his hard-hitting stories.

Abbas, 32, has been arrested, interrogated, and beaten, but remains undaunted. “The bloggers in Egypt are the last independent voice,” he recently wrote. “If we are silenced, no protests will be heard in Egypt…And so the choice to blog is not only serious, but necessary.”

“I like to compare the bloggers here and elsewhere to the underground writers and partisan reporters of France during the World War II. They were hardly perfect or well-trained. They were not observers, but activists because they rightly felt that their lives and their futures were on the line. They wrote snippets of truth, not whole truths and hoped that alone would help. … They represented the best of the republic of silence that survived brilliantly by its wits under incredible cruelty and oppression. A handful of today’s bloggers in various parts of the world have inherited their proud legacy and costly responsibilities. One of them is Wael.”

- Stephen Franklin, Knight International Journalism Fellow, Egypt

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Read his acceptance speech