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 U.S. 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 PBS 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.”5
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.”