An Iranian-born journalist, Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, launched a blog called Tehran Bureau from her parents' living room in Massachusetts in 2008.
She created it, as she explains in a Columbia Journalism Review article, because of "a dearth of in-depth reporting on Iran". Now hosted by the Guardian, a typical blogpost gets anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 hits, and sometimes "10 times as much traffic."
Through the use of digital tools and by protecting the confidentiality of its contributors, it is able to penetrate Iran's closed society by gathering "information from ordinary people, charting the trends in society from the ground up" and grasping "the granular and authentic feel of the streets."
It compensates for the fact that mainstream reporting is so constrained in Iran and many foreign media outlets are banned from the country.
Niknejad lays claim to "a huge pool of reporters, editors, and fact-checkers inside the country." She writes:
"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... It means we no longer have to accept self-censored, misleading reporting."
Iranians "are as much plugged in online as any developed society," she says, explaining that she was able to discover willing contributors through Facebook.
When Tehran Bureau was taken down on one occasion in June 2009 by a denial-of-service attack - she presumes by an Iranian government proxy - she took to Twitter.
Despite "the wrath of the regime", she was able to obtain a trickle of news via email, Skype, instant chat, and even through the odd phone call. "Text is relatively safe and easy to get out," she writes, "even when the internet slows to a crawl."
Niknejad has even managed to teach journalists inside Iran from her US base through a peer-to-peer training programme. "By pairing students with seasoned practitioners, we try to produce professional content from the start."
In order to keep people safe, the bureau works anonymously. "It's essential for security," she writes. "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."
But she has funding problems: "The biggest obstacle to our reporting has been, and remains, money... we accept no money from any government, religious faction, or interest group [which] 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 organisations in New York put it to me, 'You'll never get funding because you're Iranian.'"
She depends on the Guardian, having become part of the paper's website in early 2013.
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
