“Social media is not just transforming newsrooms – it’s transforming the very fabric of society,” says Riyaad Minty, Head of Social Media for Al Jazeera. “We are no longer the gate-keepers, and we need to understand this shift so as to make sense of it.”

“News organisations do not break the news any more: people break the news,” he says: the new news wires are social networks. When Minty heard that Osama Bin Laden had died, he immediately went to Twitter, and found an account of someone close to the site who was live-tweeting the raid. This was a totally different experience to turning on a TV.

Rather than become overwhelmed by this crisis of relevance, Minty said news organisations need to think, “How do we then effectively access this breaking news, package it and distribute it?” He was speaking at last week's World Editors Forum in Kiev.

In the future, we will see more and more information online, said Minty, and with this comes more noise, and more disinformation. Context becomes more and more crucial, and that is where news organisations thrive: Twitter can say what’s happening now, but not why.

Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, the people of Bahrain took to the streets on 14 February, 2011 demanding change. More than a year after protests began on Pearl Roundabout, the epicentre of the Bahraini revolution, many argue that little has changed for the better. For the press, this sentiment is echoed most acutely.

A number of organisations have conducted missions and produced reports that investigate the state of freedom of expression in Bahrain, only to come up with one common result; things are getting worse. Journalists and human rights defenders have faced military trials, life imprisonment, torture, harassment, and in some cases even death whilst in the custody of the Bahraini authorities.

"It's impossible to have editorial freedom without financial independence," said Aboubakr Jamai, founder and editor of Moroccan weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire, opening the business-focused session of the 5th Arab Free Press Forum, which also included Jacek Utko of Bonnier Business Press.

Many obstacles to successful news publication in the Arab World are receding, said Mohammed Alayyan, founder and publisher of Al-Ghad Daily, the first independent paper in Jordan, and the Alwasweet Weekly Newspaper.

In Tunisia, for example, it used to be very hard to get a licence to publish from the Ministry of Information. It was also difficult to find investors because many businessmen were put off by the tight controls on media properties, and the government favoured some institutions when it came to advertising and subscriptions. Since the uprisings, these problems are clearly less relevant.

So far, the Arab uprisings have not had a particularly positive effect on the financial side of the industry, said Alayyan, pointing out that advertising was down in Egypt in 2011. But in the long term, he believes that the situation will improve, as long as that governments do not own media companies. Ministries of Information should not exist, he said, as they are only a hindrance.

by Larry Kilman

With repression of Arab media lifted in some countries following the 'Arab Spring' revolutions and reforms, what needs to be done to develop a professional independent press in the region?

That was the question posed during a panel discussion Monday at the Arab Free Press Forum in Tunis, and the answer is - quite a lot of things.

Of course there is journalism training, but the needs go far beyond reporting. The challenge is how to turn media into commercial ventures.

"Journalists often don't have proper management experience or marketing experience," said Hafez al-Bukhari, President of the Yemen Polling Centre.

"A challenge in Yemen and equally in some other Arab countries, is how can media activity become a business activity? We need real, appropriate training for media production and management, it is different from traditional training workshops for journalists," he said.

Investment is another challenge, the panellists agreed. And advertising is not regulated by market conditions but by relationships and interests.

No matter how Arab media develops, they must have patience, because development doesn't happen overnight, said Tatiana Repkova, Founder and Director of the Media Managers Club.