Mahmoud Mamlouk is a passionate, ambitious journalist determined to make his mark in a field fraught with challenges. He started his career in the prestigious Al Ahram newspaper where he established a reputation for having a strong eye for good stories. He then joined Youm 7 when it was a fledgeling online breaking news platform and played an important role in its rapid success. Over the trajectory of his career over the past two decades, his ground-breaking articles gained him recognition among his peers and won him several journalism awards. In 2016, he decided to strike out on his own, starting Cairo 24, an online journal providing Egyptians with daily news, exciting exposes and exclusive stories. eniGma’s Ezz Al-Turkey spoke with the passionate journalist to learn more about his professional journey, its challenges and successes, and to get the full story on how Cairo 24 got to where it is today.
Growing up enamoured with politics, Mahmoud Mamlouk enrolled in the Faculty of Economics & Political Science at Cairo University, graduating in 2007. During his studies, he dabbled in journalism by writing about the political climate at the time, and in the process, he realised that journalism came naturally to him. His outspokenness and determination to make his opinions known never left him since those early days in the field. In hindsight, they proved to be both a blessing and a curse. He was thrilled by the stories that the public often ignored, or the rest of the media tried to bury.
Mamlouk’s strong personality and outspokenness landed him a job at Al Ahram as a journalist immediately upon graduation, thus allowing him to pursue his main passion and work at a job he loved. Al Ahram helped him get his foot in the door, however, it didn’t satisfy him completely. In 2008, eager to take up a new challenge, he decided to join Youm 7, which was just starting out at the time. He knew the founders personally, and they all felt that he would be a great addition to the platform.
At Youm 7, Mamlouk’s political spirit was on fire, with no holds barred. “I was very outspoken and working at Youm 7, when it was still new, was really exciting because I felt I was helping to build something big. It was an exciting time, and I got a lot of recognition and acclaim through those years. Youm 7 helped me grow my connections and make a name for myself, which was all I wanted at the time. I also did some thrilling stories which were great for me,” he recalls.
Mamlouk worked at Youm 7 for almost a decade before feeling that the room for his growth there had reached its limit. He had big ambitions and he needed to do more. That’s when he got the idea to start his own online platform completely on his own. It was a rocky start, to say the least. He didn’t have any outside funding and had to rely completely on himself for funding. While doing that, he had a family to care for and was under a lot of pressure to succeed in bringing his idea to fruition.
Nevertheless, Mamlouk made it happen. With strong willpower and a refusal to take no for an answer, he started gathering all the resources he could to kick off the platform. “I needed a website, so I contacted a friend of mine who is a developer, and he did it for free. I then needed office space for my small very passionate and driven staff, so I rented a small room in another company’s office. I had to overcome many challenges to get to where I am, but I was very stubborn and I made sure I did what I wanted,” he recounts. Today, Cairo 24 is one of the biggest online journals for quick 24-hour news and breaking stories.
“What really helped put us on the map was that I had my sources, and I would get exclusive breaking stories,” he explains, noting that once they were on the map, everyone was watching. “Then we started receiving very serious accusations and then there was speculation about where we were receiving our funding, which in fact came completely from me. People wouldn’t accept that I had built this from the ground up. That was quite frustrating, especially because that was never the real reason why the investigation of Cairo 24 was launched; it was because of what we were writing,” he adds. Cairo 24 closed down for a few months while Mamlouk figured out how to complete the official paperwork to keep Cairo 24 going.
That was a tough time for Mamlouk. He needed to focus on his mission to bring back Cairo 24 and not to slide into depression. “For distraction, I would walk everywhere I needed to go, every day, just so I could sleep at night when I got home. And every day I would make calls to try to get what I needed to bring Cairo 24 back. Eventually, after a few months of attempts, I finally got the okay and the official approval to get Cairo 24 back online and to start all over again,” he exclaims with a sigh of relief.
This time, however, Mamlouk took a different approach with Cairo 24’s stories. Instead of getting too political, which he suspected may have been the problem, he decided he would focus on what lies between the lines. He accepted the fact that, sometimes, restraints could be good, and in doing so Cairo 24 benefitted greatly. The office grew from a small room to a big office, and the platform went from three employees to a big team of journalists breaking news in all sectors, from politics to sports to entertainment, and more. Cairo 24 has now become a go-to for Egyptians for breaking news, viral topics and quick articles on their topics of interest.
Mamlouk couldn’t be prouder of these achievements, and after a long journey full of bumps in the road, things seem to have worked out for him. “I’m really proud of where I got with Cairo 24. I wanted to start something like this for so long and I never allowed myself to think that I didn’t have the means or that I wasn’t capable. I’ve learned a lot from this journey and I’m really proud of my team who have helped me get here. With journalism, you need passion and that’s what I look for when recruiting team members. I look for driven and talented young people who have a unique outlook on life,” he boasts.
While Cairo 24 has gone from a startup online journal to one of the biggest media platforms in Egypt, winning awards and certifications over the years, Mamlouk is not yet content with his achievements. While he takes pride in telling the untold stories and the news that people haven’t necessarily heard about, he believes he can still achieve more. “I don’t want to retell the same stories that the whole world is talking about. Of course, we still write about the big news as it happens, but our strength is in our focus on stories and details others don’t talk about. Even with big stories, we like to find a different angle, and try to present them from a different perspective. That’s what journalism is really about!”