At the turn of this century, I started noticing a torrent of messages from Iranian strangers each time I logged into my Yahoo Messenger account. I was a courts reporter in San Diego and thought the dozens of daily chat requests were coming from up north in Los Angeles, where the largest concentration of Iranians live outside their homeland. But an adjective in one message struck me. “Take a look at my photo,” one guy implored, after several unsuccessful attempts at getting my attention. “I’m really quite ghashangh.”
Ghashangh? The word, meaning pretty in Farsi, was something my grandmother in Tehran might use to describe a young boy. What macho Iranian-American would refer to himself that way?
I wrote back. “Are you in Tehran?” I asked on a hunch.
“Yes,” he said, “aren’t you?”
As it turned out, just about all the messages were streaming in from Iran–and not just Tehran. All were male, most of them very young, in their late teens or early twenties, looking for a date. They didn’t believe I was in the United States and well outside their demographics. Those circumstances made it difficult to have a proper conversation, or ask the kind of questions I wanted as a reporter, but it gave me a fascinating look inside the country.
That digital opening offered me a view into Iran that was more enlightening than any journalism coming out of the country at the time. Five years later, by the time I left for Columbia Journalism School in 2004, I was still watching when a shift occurred: Iranians had started migrating from Yahoo to Gmail. Now I noticed messages coming from the elite–university students and faculty, even an increasing number from within the cadre of the ruling establishment.
In fact, checking emails one day, I thought it peculiar that two of the bright green circles that lit up on my Gmail instant chat belonged to officials: a relatively high-ranking American and an Iranian one. Though universes apart in distance and ideology, they were next to each other, live in my email account, and easily within my grasp. I began to think of how I, as a journalist, could connect those virtual dots. The result was Tehran Bureau, the blog I launched from my parents’ living room in Massachusetts in 2008.
The blog’s name found its genesis in a conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker. Remnick attributed a dearth of in-depth reporting on Iran to a lack of any news organization with “a real bureau there.” Tehran Bureau was a response to shrinking foreign news coverage in the United States. It defied tradition. I was not actually in Iran, but thanks to digital reporting tools the blog could tackle media stereotypes and fill in some of the gaps left by newspapers’ scaling back overseas staffs.
As it turned out, the virtual bureau became the new frontline. In a very short time, Tehran Bureau went from occupying a small perch on blogspot.com to a partnership with PBS Frontline. It now reaches a larger audience at The Guardian, where Tehran Bureau is hosted on the newspaper’s popular website and featured occasionally in print. At its Guardian home, a typical Tehran Bureau post gets anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 hits, though some stories–like a recent piece about modeling–drew 10 times as much traffic.
During this growth process, Tehran Bureau went through another, subtler, but significant change. We went from being thousands of miles away from the story to being there–literally. In time, we transitioned from doing all of our reporting from a US post to growing a huge pool of reporters, editors, and factcheckers inside the country.
It happened organically, in part because “the old frame for thinking of ‘natives’ who are staying back home and ‘natives’ who have left home doesn’t quite work anymore,” said Iraj Omidvar, an Iranian-American professor who teaches English, technical communication, and media in Atlanta. Thanks to digital technology, “Iranians in Iran and abroad are tied in unprecedented ways that are dramatically changing a wide range of cultural phenomena.” Not the least of which is journalism.
‘The tremor in the air’
A widely held belief about new media and traditional foreign correspondence suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, a foreign correspondent steeped in the best practices of our profession heads off to cover a war, revolution, or natural disaster in some far-flung place, notebook in hand, ready to bear witness. On the other, a pajama-clad blogger pontificates from an armchair in Maryland about events thousands of miles away. It’s all at his fingertips: the flood of news, images, and video captured by citizen journalists on the ground. Why would you need a correspondent to be there as an eyewitness too?
Well, because, “No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smoulder, or the cadence of a scream,” Roger Cohen argued in a June 2009 column for The New York Times, making an eloquent appeal for traditional foreign correspondence. Cohen had just been ousted from Iran, from where he had continued to report on the violent aftermath of the presidential election even after he was stripped of his press card.
“No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night,” Cohen wrote. “No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.”
No doubt Cohen argued a strong point about being there on the scene, recording everything firsthand. But now, using digital technology, there is another way to grasp the granular and authentic feel of the streets. This process uses new online tools, not to circumvent the most sacred principles of journalism, but to advance them–especially when reporting on authoritarian countries like Iran, Ethiopia, North Korea, or the United Arab Emirates, to name just a few. New media allows journalists to cast their nets wider than ever in some of the most underreported places in the world.
At Tehran Bureau we gather information from ordinary people, charting the trends in society from the ground up. By remaining anonymous and going under the radar, we can penetrate a closed society whose members have largely withdrawn into tight-knit units. We operate without official access, beyond the controls and spin the government uses to manipulate or influence journalists in traditional Tehran bureaus. Thus, new media allows us to do the kind of independent reporting that is virtually impossible for a physical news bureau inside Iran.
The price of access
In my first three years as a staff writer for a news service in California and a small newspaper in Massachusetts, I was on the scene of just about every story I covered. It’s what made me fall in love with reporting. Once, in those early days, I heard two national reporters at the Los Angeles Times commiserating about a new editor. He’d ordered them to report using the phone in all but the most exceptional cases. Sacrilegious, I thought. Even then.
But Los Angeles is not Tehran, or Damascus, or Hanoi, or any of a number of other capitals where governments keep tight reins on foreign correspondents–not to mention their own journalists. The press freedoms enjoyed in American and European societies yield a high level of reliability in the coverage of news in the Western world. Not so when it comes to partially closed societies such as Iran, where foreign correspondents can face a series of obstacles that prevent unfettered newsgathering.
The first hurdle for foreign journalists seeking to cover authoritarian regimes is often the necessity of getting official accreditation from the government. In Iran this can involve long and difficult negotiations with government officials. Those who make it through the accreditation process are then subject to constant monitoring by the government. This is done by requiring visiting reporters to employ minders from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Interviews must be arranged through the minder, who usually sits next to the reporter during these sessions and acts as a translator.
Foreign correspondents often fail to tell their viewers and readers about the omnipresent minders, though some eventually reveal details after they leave their reporting posts. Azadeh Moaveni, an Iranian-American who reported for Time magazine from Iran for several years, later admitted to being constantly “trailed by a hook-nosed security agent, bullied to inform on my sources, and threatened with prosecution for ‘endangering national security.’ ” In her book, Honeymoon in Tehran, she describes Mr. X, her secret government minder, as “perhaps the most important person in my Iranian life.”
There’s another layer of control too. Minders have shadow minders, a longstanding practice in Iranian statecraft, where somebody is watching the person watching you–just to make sure that your personal minder does the government’s bidding.
For the few foreign journalists with access to the country, the pressures don’t end with getting accreditation and having to hire a minder who’s on a government payroll. There is always the danger of losing the hard-won government credentials, and to avoid that, it’s necessary to self-censor your journalism. This is true for all foreign correspondents, but particularly for Iranians or those with Iranian spouses who are filing from inside the country for foreign news outlets. They work under even greater duress because their families are virtual hostages.
The latest example involved Washington Post Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian, who has dual US-Iranian citizenship, and his journalist wife Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian citizen. They, along with a dual-nationality photographer, were arrested in July of 2014. The photographer, who was not identified publicly at the family’s request, was released a month later, while Rezaian and Salehi remained incarcerated but uncharged. The Post described the detentions as evidence of yet another high-level internal political struggle–though in reality they follow a long-standing pattern of dealing with foreign correspondents.
When Nazila Fathi, a local correspondent for The New York Times, fled Iran in 2009, she explained how the Iranian establishment was more restrictive with respect to foreign reporting than the domestic press. Certain topics, such as executions, she said, were so sensitive that she was prohibited from writing about them, even though some of their accounts were published in Iranian newspapers. Fathi also learned that Iran’s intelligence services draw no line between work and private life. In her case, the government’s monitoring extended beyond listening to her calls and reading her emails. As she recounts in a forthcoming memoir, the woman who looked after her toddlers in her home was a government spy.
The experience of Guardian correspondent Dan De Luce is illustrative of the cost of bucking the system in countries like Iran. De Luce arrived in Tehran in January of 2003. Like Fathi and Moaveni, he was working there when conditions were actually pretty good. Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, was president. It was a time of relative openness for the press. And yet, even under Khatami it was difficult for a foreign correspondent to cover the country.
“Difficult in a subtle way,” De Luce explained to me back then. On the surface there appeared to be a certain openness, but in effect “foreign journalists are on a tight leash by the visa regime,” he said. “It’s very difficult for a reporter to get into the country, and once in, there is the sensitive matter of getting one’s visa renewed every three months. That is a check that discourages journalists from pursuing certain stories.”
The government also discourages controversial stories by intimidating the translators and fixers, said De Luce. They’re very closely watched, their telephones are tapped, and they are interrogated by the government on a regular basis. “I knew that whatever I did was going to be an open book.”
Translators have a way of not pursuing a correspondent’s story without coming out and saying “no” directly, he explained. Sometimes, even when translators are willing to cross the line, the correspondent may not be willing to take that risk on behalf of the fixer or translator.
Language is another barrier to good reporting. Foreign journalists in Iran or other restrictive countries often do not speak the local language, “so they miss a lot,” said De Luce. “They speak to each other, to other foreigners, and diplomats.” And yet native language skills can also be a hazard. The government is particularly paranoid about Iranian expats, who can pass through the country easily with their Iranian passports and fluent language abilities.
“A lot of what is going on there never sees the light of day,” De Luce said. “What goes on is as mysterious as the goings-on in the Kremlin during the Soviet era.” Add to that the paranoia of the Iranian government, which tends to view foreigners as spies or fomenters of revolution, he offered. And when it comes to its own citizens, the government believes it can operate with impunity. De Luce cited the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was bludgeoned to death in the summer of 2003 while in police custody. That would have never happened to him or another foreigner, he said.
What did happen to De Luce is more typical of the fate of the foreign correspondent who overstepped limits in the former Soviet Union or China. Following the 2003 earthquake in Bam, a city in the Iranian province of Kerman, most correspondents waited in Tehran for earthquake news from formal channels. De Luce and his wife, who wrote for an Irish newspaper, signed up to go to the earthquake region as volunteer rescue workers. Once there, they documented the frustrations and devastation of the earthquake survivors–until the government expelled them. Their crime was being too aggressive in getting the story.
Not one foreign journalist based in Tehran was willing to protest his expulsion, said De Luce; all were too concerned with maintaining their own access. He understands, though. Is it such a success to be “really gung ho” and get kicked out and not report anything at all, he asks, or, “Isn’t it better to have someone there?” De Luce’s response: There is no right answer.
Going vertical
Playing by the rules may lead to flawed reporting, but it gets at “one version of the truth,” said a former foreign editor at a major US newspaper. But that’s a shaky argument. When the self-censored reporting of a Tehran-based foreign correspondent is published by a mainstream newspaper of record, and cited widely, it becomes much more than just one competing strain of a story. In fact, until the recent proliferation of blogs, that one self-censored version was often the only one that filled the news vacuum.
I’m not advocating that news organizations abandon foreign bureaus in authoritarian countries–only that they supplement their reporting from those places and use their websites as platforms to present deeper work and multiple voices that don’t all fit in the daily print paper.
Bill Rempel, a former senior editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, once told me that ideally he’d like big news developments from Iran reported independently, by separate reporters, even if they turned up different stories or conclusions. Rempel said the stories could play side by side, so that readers could take a look and make up their own minds.
Using new digital tools and resources makes that possible and affordable. And doing it means we no longer have to accept self-censored, misleading reporting, like the kind that helped Khatami–the president when Dan De Luce was thrown out of Iran–receive such glowing coverage from foreign correspondents who played by the rules.
Reading the news during the Khatami era, I felt there was a gap between what I saw in mainstream media here and public opinion in Iran. I took up this theme in my master’s project at Columbia Journalism School. The problems I encountered helped explain why I thought I was getting a clearer and more nuanced picture reporting on Iran from New York.
My not being there had distinct advantages in the internet age, when technology opened up many new avenues of communication and allowed new voices to be heard. In an article for Nieman Reports a few months after Tehran Bureau was launched, I explained that one of my primary motivations in setting up “the virtual Iran beat” was to assemble a staff of reporters and editors who spoke Farsi. This meant we could tap into a more extensive network and speak to more Iranians, even if we were not based in Tehran. And free of the filters that limit internet access from within Iran, we could read Iranian bloggers–those who write in Iran and those who live in exile.
That was the idea, anyway. Before the 2009 post-election crackdown, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, blogging about Iran. Most were very opinionated, but even blogs with a strong point of view could be useful for possible story leads or a different perspective on an issue. When Iran’s internal factional war spilled into the open, even more valuable information began to appear online–often posted by one faction seeking to discredit another. Tehran Bureau was well positioned to scan this wide range of views, along with the Iranian press, to help inform the reporting by our staff.
To date, the online resources for us are relatively rich because Iranians are as much plugged in online as any developed society. As the academic Omidvar explained, “Networked digital media is permitting conversations that could never have taken place before, between people who would have never come into contact with each other, with often dramatic results that no one could have possibly predicted adequately.”
Toolkit nuts and bolts
Before launching Tehran Bureau, I set out to meet as many Iranians as I could. Since I emigrated from Iran in 1984, I had lived, worked, or spent a lot of time in cities with large Iranian communities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, London, and Dubai. I knew that ties between south Iran and what is now the United Arab Emirates stretch back hundreds of years, with waves of migration that started long before the 1979 revolution. Today there is a crosscurrent of Iranians heading to the Emirates, and though they are largely middle class they offer a greater mix of opinions than you might find in your social circles in Tehran. Most of them retain close ties to the motherland. At Tehran Bureau, most of us are part of that kind of virtual community, giving us a rich network to mine–as we did, thanks to new media, during the heavily contested election and its bloody aftermath.
I launched the blog in November of 2008. The choice to use a blog format was a budget issue; I had no money to create a more complex website, but from its beginning Tehran Bureau was designed to publish reported stories, not thought pieces or opposition rants.
Our first dispatch from Tehran was a reaction to President Obama’s election victory. It was cited by ABC News and the BBC World Service. Tehran Bureau went into syndication soon thereafter. The first news organization to buy one of our stories was The New York Times–all before the Iranian presidential election in June of 2009.
In February of that year, back in Boston, my sister brought up a name I hadn’t heard in 25 years. “Do you remember her?” she asked. “She was a classmate. She found me on Facebook. See if you can find her.” When I found this former classmate on Facebook, I came across other mutual friends, many of them long-lost classmates from the time of the Iran-Iraq war. I’d already been on Facebook for about three years and had found a few profiles that appeared to have been posted from Tehran.
Four months before the election, these new profiles from my classmates turned out to be part of a much larger wave–so large that it felt as if the whole of the Islamic Republic had joined Facebook overnight. I followed the presidential campaign in part via status updates on Facebook. It was like having a front row seat. One contact was working for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and had an insider’s view of much of what was happening. The first signs of trouble came when that contact reported an attack on the opposition candidate’s headquarters on the eve of the vote. And when YouTube videos of demonstrations began spreading via Facebook, an Iranian neighbor was the first to alert me.
I took to Twitter once our website was taken down by a powerful denial-of-service attack in June of 2009, presumably by an Iranian government proxy. The incumbent regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had declared victory (which many deemed fraudulent) and now needed to cut off the election coverage in English; it did so swiftly by canceling journalists’ visas or confining correspondents based there to their offices. Safely outside, I could continue to get the story out. Even when the wrath of the regime spread through cyberspace, news continued to trickle in via email, Skype, instant chat–even, occasionally, the telephone. Text is relatively safe and easy to get out, even when the internet slows to a crawl.
Though limited to microblogging, I didn’t want to do away with gritty details or pare harrowing accounts down to 140 characters. On Twitter, I used full quotes and punctuated as much as possible. I indicated when a quote came to an end, or when a story would be carried by successive tweets. I reported these accounts from some of my most trusted sources in the network I’d built. I avoided tweets from random strangers.
Actually, at that time, few Iranians were on Twitter, though the often-used term “Twitter Revolution” did aptly capture the moment. Twitter was social networking stripped down to its most fundamental. Reports came out in YouTube videos and firsthand accounts from other channels making their way to that narrow intersection. And it was on Twitter that some in the media already had a listening post.
Tehran Bureau’s Twitter reporting on the elections and the aftermath was cobbled into narratives on the New York Times‘ Lede blog and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish. Our Twitter feed, @TehranBureau, went from a few hundred followers to 19,000 in two days. There are more than 45,000 now, though I rarely tweet anymore.
Tehran Bureau’s election coverage in 2009 is a typical example of how mainstream and new media are coming together in journalism. Twitter and other social media have become an integral part of getting the news out when a major event erupts somewhere in the world. But what if that kind of synergy were systematic and employed more broadly, beyond breaking news? What would it unearth? What could it mean for investigative reporting in closed societies?
That’s still a largely untapped idea. Citizen journalism played an important role in Iran’s 2009 crisis, but when the story went underground, the citizens reporting it did too. They generally lack the necessary perspective and investigative techniques to continue chronicling events in a meaningful way. These skills remain crucial–perhaps even more crucial–when the story is no longer on the street in the form of riots or demonstrations.
In Iran, the number of people able to report credibly from the inside diminished significantly over the course of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term. Those with ties outside the country left. Inside Iran, the ability of journalists to gather and disseminate news was greatly hampered by the state’s ongoing crackdown on the press. But equally significant was the lack of Iranian journalists trained in international standards of reporting.
To continue and expand reporting from the ground, Tehran Bureau launched “Iran Standard Time.” Adapted from the Washington Post‘s “Time Zones,” it offers a view into a doctor’s life, a taxi ride, and other aspects of everyday life inside the Islamic Republic. We also expanded the commentary and analysis section, which may have allowed more opinion to seep through, but it also helped give context to a complex story that wouldn’t have been available otherwise. We have also devoted a large section to translating Farsi-language news sites. In the tumultuous post-election climate, the Iranian blogosphere was often the best place to read between the lines and figure out what was going on; it’s where we learned, for example, that hardline factions were going after each other in public once their reformist targets were in jail or otherwise silenced.
The hardest and most rewarding part of the job is to discover and foster new talent, especially at a distance. Traditional online training programs aimed at Iranian journalists often don’t succeed in teaching how to report accurately and ethically. One problem is that many of the journalists who undergo training are set in their ways and too proud to take instruction. Another is that the training programs financed by Western governments, including the United States, often just aren’t organized effectively.
At Tehran Bureau, I’m trying to get around some of those obstacles with a peer-to-peer training program. This way we can calibrate the instruction to the level of the student. By pairing students with seasoned practitioners, we try to produce professional content from the start. Translators, who may be journalists in their own right, assist or take active part in these working groups to bridge any language gaps and provide an extra layer of reporting.
To keep everyone safe, we work anonymously–a policy that may be viewed as anathema to good journalism. Iran operates on anonymity, though. And for our correspondents, it’s essential for security. The openness and transparency that make for good reporting practices in New York or Washington, DC are meaningless in Tehran–even, I would argue, reckless.
As we expand the network, we recruit trusted reporters in different neighborhoods, and eventually regions, with access to different strata of society. Even though our correspondents don’t know each other, we can collaborate on stories through our shared link outside the country. If a new reporter has a scoop, I can simultaneously assign the same story to a second reporter with whom I have worked and trust. The two reports may overlap and complement each other; if they don’t, we try to figure out why, a process that may add more nuance to the reporting. Or, it may convince us that the story is flawed and not useable.
Rather than framing journalism in the traditional newsgathering mold, which focuses on the policy announcements of the ruling elite, Tehran Bureau covers Iran from the bottom up. Our correspondents usually don’t have the press credentials required to attend government press conferences and conduct interviews with high-level policymakers, but they have unrivaled access to, and understanding of, the often unpredictable society in which they live. This is not citizen journalism; this is professional journalism, done undercover. They use notebooks and pens. They don’t carry cameras or other conspicuous equipment. Emails cloaked with aliases provide additional cover.
More left undone
Still, we’ve only scratched the surface, hindered not by the government of Iran but by lack of funding. The biggest obstacle to our reporting has been, and remains, money. We’re not a think tank and don’t fill a policy prescription. Because we accept no money from any government, religious faction, or interest group, it effectively cuts us off from some of the richest sources of funding, including the US government. Although we work hard to stay above the political or ideological fray, most big foundations are reluctant to support us because of the contentious subject matter. And as a board member at one of these prominent organizations in New York put it to me, “You’ll never get funding because you’re Iranian.”
I have been fortunate to eke out a salary, first from Frontline and now from the Guardian, where we became part of the paper’s website in early 2013. “While serious independent journalism remains nearly impossibly in Iran,” the Guardian said in announcing our arrival, “[Tehran Bureau] is able to provide original reporting throughout its extensive list of contacts both inside and outside the republic, and to bring the voices of ordinary people to an international audience.”
I make our small budget stretch as far as it will go to pay editors, writers, and, when possible, translators–most of whom have generously donated their time to make it possible to pay more reporters. We are still looking for long-term funding for what has already proven to be a valuable journalistic enterprise; the journalists who work for us need other jobs, too, to survive.
In the meantime, according to editor and correspondent Oliver August of The Economist, Iran remains “the most underreported country in the world.” It doesn’t have to be that way, however, said Omidvar, the Atlanta professor. “There is a massive, untapped–but tappable–pool of Iranian talent for collecting, distributing, and evaluating information on,” he said. And with the right combination of online technologies and journalistic skill, it can be done in ways that “apparatuses of repression would never be able to counter.”
This story is a chapter in The New Global Journalism: Foreign Correspondence in Transition, a new report from Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. There is a lecture based on the report at Columbia’s Journalism School on October 30.
Kelly Golnoush Niknejad is the editor of the Tehran Bureau