SS:

We were all at Pierre’s apartment when Mubarak stepped down, celebrating. We were kind of talking about alternative media and how it was so important for the revolution to create alternative media. Someone said to us, “Why don’t you just start a newspaper?” We said okay, tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we have a meeting. And the next day we had a meeting and we started working on the newspaper, just like that.

SS:

When it started it was about challenging the law: in order to start a newspaper here you have to get certification from state security. So it was kind of a challenge; freedom of expression was our main goal [. . .] We believe in awareness. Awareness comes through freedom of expression and not the other way around. So Gornal is basically about giving people a tool to express themselves.

SS:

We want to print things we don’t agree with. For example, one of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood is writing something. We want some articles from people who support the military as well, even if we personally don’t believe in the military’s performance in ruling the country. But many of these people don’t want to write.
[Why don’t they want to write?]
I think it’s because the whole newspaper looks like it’s very revolutionary and stuff and so they just don’t want to join in with something like that.

On the role of Twitter and Facebook, SS:

It’s very exaggerated, definitely. They think all we do is tweet. But it’s true that, like five years ago, people would complain about torture and stuff like that and nobody believed them. If you discussed police brutality with people in the streets, there was no awareness about it at all, but when the videos of torture came out on the internet… Things started to change. Maybe it could have happened through another tool, but this is how the change began.

On those too poor and hungry for revolution:

SS:There are two kinds of people who are against Gornal. There are people who benefited from this regime, who benefited from the corruption. Or there are people who are very, very poor, and it’s very hard for them…
HT: During the revolution, they didn’t have food. Prices went up, so that was hard.
SS: I kind of realized that two weeks after the protests. A lot of them are very angry, they say, “You are ruining our lives.”

Asking the military for an interview, SS:

I told him we are working on an independent newspaper and we want to do an interview with Ismail Etman, a member of the military council. And he asked me, “What is the interview about, and with whom?” And I said, “You can just say we are the youth of the revolution, you know, the Facebook people.”

And this is how the interview ends. Soppy git that I am, I cried, a little.

Can we ask you a really stupid question? Did you have a plan of what you wanted to do when you grew up? Before the revolution? And has it changed?
HT: Well, my plan got ruined when I started college. I wanted to major in fashion design, but now I am majoring in journalism because there is no fashion design major. But I don’t think it has changed. I started thinking more politically about everything. My goals became more about the people; people around me at least.
Are you still going to be a fashion designer?
HT: Yes! For the people.

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