"Scholarship on AI and journalism in the Global South has highlighted how digital and data colonialism reproduce global hierarchies of power, labour, and knowledge, often through platform capitalism and externally controlled technological infrastructures. Yet limited empirical research examines how ... newsrooms in the Global South navigate these asymmetries in practice. This article analyses how Al‐Masry Al‐Youm, one of Egypt’s leading news organisations, integrates AI into editorial and technical operations under structural dependency. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with journalists, editors, and technical staff, it examines how the newsroom adopts, adapts, and governs AI across data journalism, fact‐checking, and generative applications. The findings show that reliance on global technology providers embeds forms of platform dependency within newsroom operations, while journalists and editors exercise bounded and situational agency through local adaptation, self‐training, and the development of ethical guardrails that institutionalise responsible use. At the same time, AI adoption intensifies existing sustainability challenges, as journalistic content and labour increasingly support AI systems without corresponding financial return. To make sense of these findings, we introduce the concept of “defensive AI governance,” showing how AI adoption is managed through organisational practices of limitation, supervision, and infrastructural self‐protection. By grounding this concept in organisation‐level evidence from the Global South, the study contributes to debates on platform power, journalistic agency, and AI governance in journalism." (Abstract) more

"The transformations in the media and political landscapes in Egypt over the last decade and their implications on media pluralism and freedom of expression are well documented. However, less is known about how Egyptian journalists themselves experience these changes; how their relationships with au ... thorities and ordinary citizens are being redefined, and how journalists’ routines and practices are evolving. Through interviews with twenty Egyptian journalists working for different types of media outlets (government-owned, independent, privately owned, opposition and new start-ups), this article records and analyses journalists’ experiences with both authorities and citizens amid the current transitional period, assessing to what extent these relationships and experiences are impacting journalism practices in Egypt. Findings reveal that journalists perceive a hostile stance from both officials and ordinary citizens towards journalists due to a common belief that journalists played a role in the removal of previous regimes and therefore are seen as “destabilising agents”. This prevents journalists from accessing both information and news sources, forcing journalists to produce unified content and practice self-censorship and “service journalism” as opposed to original and investigative stories. These challenges are discussed in light of research on media and democratic transition." (Abstract) more

"In this article, we use Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences (HOI) model as a framework to investigate the ways in which Egyptian journalists perceive the influences exerted on them in the context of the post-Arab Spring transition. Our findings show that perceptions of limitations to jo ... urnalism practice can extend to all levels in the HOI model and that journalistic autonomy is particularly impeded due to factors at the social system level. This leads to an adaptation of the HOI model as we find that the perceived closure of the public sphere and a complicated network of clientelism at the social system level has impacted journalism practice negatively in Eg ypt and has a wider influence on the rest of the four levels in the model. In other words, routines, individuals, organizations, and social institutions all seem to mediate the social system’s influence on journalistic behavior." (Abstract) more