Eissa still tends the most boisterous patch of Egypt's still-tender garden of free expression. At 45, the veteran editor might boast the toughest hide of any Egyptian journalist. During the long tenure of President Hosni Mubarak, Eissa was fired from nearly a dozen jobs and dashed all the regime's taboos. In 2007, he was sentenced to a year in prison for writing about Mubarak's failing health, which was treated as a state secret. (The sentence later was overturned on appeal, but the case successfully muzzled the Egyptian press.) For five years, he ran the liveliest paper in Egypt, Al Dostour ("The Constitution"), building it into enough of a threat that in October 2010 Mubarak had a crony buy the paper and fire Eissa the next day.

Mubarak's gone, but the system of media control and censorship through which he ruled and stifled dissent is not. Newsprint is subsided and all papers are printed by two state presses. Daily papers sell for 1 Egyptian pound, or about 17 cents. To this day, state media still takes its marching orders from the ruling generals, ignoring stories about torture and judicial collusion while frequently publishing unsubstantiated or patently false stories about revolutionary activists.

Bloggers and reporters for mainstream newspapers and television channels have been summoned for questioning in recent months after publishing stories that displeased Egypt's ruling generals. At least two bloggers have been arrested by the military; Maikel Nabil was sentence to three years in prison in April for criticizing the military online, while blogger Loai Nagaty was arrested at the end of June and faced the prospect of a military trial until he was released yesterday.

Critical journalists are pushing back. Another daily, Youm 7, has launched since the January uprising, along with an unrelated independent television network also called Tahrir.

Against this backdrop, Eissa is aiming his new publication at the vanguard of the Egyptian revolution. "There are 1 million Facebook users and half a million people on Twitter in Egypt," he said. "They are my target audience. This paper is sarcastic and cynical -- it's not really concerned with the old generation."

He's gotten the financial backing of Egypt's media magnate Ibrahim El Moellam, and has assembled a staff of 150 reporters, average age 30. "Half of these reporters were in Tahrir Square during the revolution," Eissa says.

The first issue debuted on Sunday, with a press run of 120,000. The website will go live in a few weeks, but editors post most of the stories to the paper's Facebook page. Early editions have been packed with scathing reportage about the state's mishandling of prosecutions of former regime officials, and the June 28 clashes with riot police in which more than 1,000 protesters were wounded, the worst violence since Mubarak resigned.