M ubasher, transmitted from the heart of the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University, is Egypt's first university-run online radio station and newspaper. It is managed by volunteers from the faculty, and students who attend other faculties and universities in Egypt and have administrative and broadcasting skills. Aya Ezzeldin, 19, is the head of the public-relations unit at Mubasher. The idea emerged in 2011, when some Faculty of Engineering students decided to set up a radio station but didn't know how to build on the idea. “They started to learn how to broadcast, record and write the programme materials, and when they were ready they launched the station,” Ezzeldin said, adding that at first it consisted of Faculty of Engineering students only, with Faculty of Mass Communications students joining later. “Our vision is to take a leading role in developing the student community by using different media products providing facts and professionalism to students,” said Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz, 22, one of Mubasher's founders. In its first year, the radio station's audience was limited, but the following year it increased, especially after a clever marketing campaign. “We set up a marketing booth in the university and began to explain more about the Mubasher radio station. We distributed badges with the station logo to help all the students know about it,” Ezzeldin said. According to Abdel-Aziz, the target was to set up a media platform for all Cairo University students. “We work to raise the knowledge of the students on all the aspects of life — whether cultural, social or political — in addition to covering issues and events relating to university students,” he said. Mubasher provides an instant news service. The station gives everyone a chance to improve their talents, provide information and suggest new ideas. Ezzeldin said that the Mubasher team has used young talent in different media production fields. These talents use their skills to introduce Mubasher's vision, using simple tools that contribute to spreading this vision as widely as possible. “Our slogan is to provide a real voice for all Cairo University students. We began experimental broadcasting in April 2012. Mubasher's programme map is renewed every few months, and every season is launched with a new slogan,” explained Abdel-Aziz. “Our first season was in July 2014. Our last was in February 2015, and we have had six seasons up to now,” he added. Mubasher uses around-the-clock, non-stop streaming, and its programmes are available on Youtube and Soundcloud social media channels to enable students to listen to them whenever they want. Ezzeldin further explained that Mubasher's listeners at the beginning were only from among the university student population, but now people from outside and from all over the world have joined the station's fans. “We have upgraded our server to enable our listeners to listen to the radio any time they want, because the server is designed to serve unlimited numbers of listeners. Mubasher now has 104,000 listeners from all over the world, with a total number of 560,000 listening sessions,” he said. Abdel-Aziz said that the first Mubasher newspaper trial issue was published in March 2014. It was welcomed by Cairo University students, who received free copies. A bi-monthly newspaper covering important university events and other issues was started in 2015, and the plan now is to “gradually increase the number of copies to enable new student segments to read the newspaper,” Abdel-Aziz said. The role of the Mubasher radio station, as recounted by Ezzeldin, is not only to produce useful programmes, but also to provide free workshops in the field of media production by media experts. It aims to help students become qualified in the media field, and many students have applied to join these workshops on an annual basis, which are sponsored by many partners. “We invite students to events that will help them to work in audio production and parallel media channels, as well as help them build their volunteering work and encourage new ideas,” he said. Mubasher covers student activities and works as a media sponsor for them. “Our Facebook page is now the largest among all student pages, with some 205,000 followers. We depend on social media tools to market our products, in addition to member campaigns in different university campuses across Egypt,” he added. Ezzeldin believes that the success of Mubasher's team, consisting of 170 students including announcers, editors, sound engineers and administration members, can be put down to all of the volunteers working in an organised way that depends on a balanced administrative hierarchy and clear rules, along with a commitment to voluntary work. “First, we depended on ourselves to fund the station but later, when we began to expand, we started to approach businessmen, NGOs and companies that target university students to implement the station's development plan,” Abdel-Aziz said. Mubasher today has many partners, some of them governmental, like the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Technology, as well as Cairo University and Helwan University. Among the station's sponsors are non-profit organisations like UNESCO, the International Media Support Organisation, the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, Aswatona.net and the American University in Cairo. Mubasher from Cairo University remains a non-profit project and all the funds raised are spent on equipment and services needed to run the project. “We want to be the biggest and most unique media-production service community in all the Egyptian universities, and to offer a new experience of alternative media,” Ezzeldin said. The writer is a freelance journalist.
