A magazine for a city that refuses to sit still

Cairo is reported abroad in two registers: crisis and antiquity. Both are real; neither is a city of twenty-odd million people making a living, making art and making up their minds. We work in the gap between those registers - the gallery opening and the zoning fight behind it, the fund raising money in New Cairo, the film that took six years to clear, the street that changed name and character in a single season.

The sections are culture, society, business and the arts, and they leak into one another constantly. A story about rent is a story about music venues. A story about a museum is a story about money. We would rather follow the story across the border than file it neatly on one side.

Reporting happens in person. Our writers go to the place, sit with the people involved and stay long enough to be told something that was not in the press release. Where we rely on a document, a dataset or another publication’s work, we say so and we link to it.

Sources are named wherever naming them is safe and fair. When someone speaks on condition of anonymity, an editor knows who they are and why the condition was granted, and the piece tells you what the person stands to gain or lose. We do not publish quotes we cannot attribute to a real human being.

Every piece is read by an editor before it runs. Nothing is published to beat a competitor by four minutes.

Editorial decisions are made by the newsroom and by nobody else. Commercial relationships never buy coverage, never buy silence, and are disclosed on any piece they touch. If a writer has a personal stake in a subject, that appears in the piece, not in a footnote nobody reads.

We get things wrong. When we do, we fix the story, say plainly what changed and when, and leave the note in place - a correction that disappears is not a correction. If you have spotted an error, the fastest route is [email protected].

kmt - Kemet - is what Egyptians called Egypt long before anyone called it Egypt: the black land, meaning the dark silt the Nile left behind, the ground things actually grow in. It is a name about fertile soil rather than monuments, which is the right end of the history to start from.

We set it lowercase, after the city, because the subject here is the present tense. Hence the line under the masthead: Egypt, in the present tense.