Before and after the January 25 uprisings in Egypt, public and scholarly attention moved from the early political bloggers to today's citizen journalists who use not only blogs but any available means to disseminate alternative information. The use of new 'information and communication technologies' (icts) is no longer an asset for the secular-civil opposition only. Since 2011, various groups, including the Salafists and the military, have resorted to the use of icts to establish their influence in public life. In this article, I offer an examination of citizen journalism as political practice and public debate in the Middle East and North Africa. This research may shed light on the everyday appropriations of this traveling concept and the meanings it engenders through actual practices in given socio-cultural contexts. I also argue that the ambiguities around the Arabic translations of citizen journalism provide a way to examine the uneasy processes of state transformation in today's Egypt.