IranWire provides factual and up-to-date news focused on Iran.
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IranWire is a collaborative news website run by professional Iranian journalists in the diaspora and citizen journalists inside Iran. IranWire empowers reporters and activists by creating a safe space in which they can share and discuss local and national affairs, in an environment free of censorship or coercion. We share our analysis with audiences around the world, publishing in several languages including Persian, English, Arabic, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, and Spanish.
IranWire was founded in 2013 in response to ongoing and brutal assaults on freedom of expression inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. We provide unique, insightful coverage on topics of genuine interest to Iranians and people curious about Iran. But we also aim to address the accountability gap created by the atrophy of independent media in the country over the past 40 years.
Many of our regular writers were forced to leave their country of birth due to the suffocating political atmosphere, insecurity, or fear for their lives. Others still live in Iran and are helping IranWire and other independent outlets to keep alive the tradition of principled, fearless reporting, as Iran goes through the most challenging period in its recent history. We pair Iranian citizen journalists with professional mentors across the globe in a bid to support them in this critical task.
IranWire has a strong focus on documenting human rights abuses in Iran, fact-checking official claims and analyzing government competence in its most important task: caring for the people. But we also want to shine a light on the particularities of day-to-day life in our beautiful country, Iran’s rich history and contemporary struggles, and those of its neighbors. We tend to avoid macro issues such as the nuclear program, which are abundantly covered by bigger media organizations, and focus instead on more granular issues affecting the lives of ordinary Iranians. From workplace sexism to the persecution of minorities, rent hikes to the brain drain, we hope to give readers a comprehensive picture of the situation in Iran through articles, documentaries, cartoons, and digital storytelling. The English website publishes just a fraction of the content on the Persian site. So our advice to those who want an in-depth understanding of Iran remains: learn Persian!
We also sometimes share content produced for IranWire’s sister projects, which have a different focus but are defined by the same open, rights-driven approach. These include Journalism is Not a Crime, a site dedicated to freedom of speech, Khamenei.com, which reviews the leadership of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since 1988, Abbas and the Revolution, a unique website about the work of the great Iranian photographer Abbas, Health Studio, a Covid-19 and public health fact-checking initiative prompted by the pandemic, and our most recent project, Adyan-Iran: a digital collection of our years of coverage of Iran’s religious minority communities.
We welcome submissions from people of all backgrounds and experience levels. If you’ve got something you’d like to share, please read the guidelines here and get in touch.
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