When I moved to Egypt at the end of 2005, the only options for local, English-language daily newspapers were The Egyptian Gazette and The Daily Star. (There is also a highly informative weekly, Al Ahram Weekly, a must-read for Arabist culture vultures and political junkies.)

The Gazette is an unintentionally hilarious broadsheet marked by lots of misspellings, grammatical errors and lurid crime stories. More than once, I've been tempted to clip a headline and send it in to Jay Leno's show. (Recent examples: "Employees milking the system" and "Cairo under a cloud again") The paper was founded in 1880 and remains a quirky Cairo institution, but perhaps not the most reliable source for hard-hitting news and analysis.

So, we turn to the Daily Star, recently renamed the Daily News (if anyone knows why/when this change occurred, please let me know). It was established in 2005 and is distributed as an insert to the International Herald Tribune. It also was linked to the troubled Lebanese paper of the same name, though the local paper's Web site says it has an Egyptian-led editorial staff and is "the only independent English-language daily in Egypt." (Its independence has been called into question. This photo controversy is one example.)

The growing pains were obvious when the Daily Star debuted in 2005. The paper ran mostly rehashed wire stories, a few sports updates and content borrowed from its sister paper in Beirut. As a newly relocated journalist trying to learn more about Cairo, I found it most useful on the entertainment front. Its listings alerted me to museum openings, film festivals and concerts that introduced me to Egyptian cultural life. For news, however, we still turned to the Arabic-language publications such as Al Masry al Youm and other semi-independent local papers.

Two years later, the Daily Star (aka Daily News) has become a valuable resource for keeping tabs on Cairo. I don't know whether it was just a natural growing process or the result of a management change, but the Daily Star appears to have come into its own. Every day, there are lots of bylined stories from local writers. An issue this week featured goodies that ranged from a look at the remnants of Cairo's Jewish Quarter to the state of blogging in Egypt.

If you're looking for a comprehensive English-language newspaper with an Egyptian focus, think twice before throwing out that insert to your Herald Tribune.