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 2009 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 twenty-five 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 (DoS) 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 micro-blogging, I didn’t want to do away with gritty details or pare harrowing accounts down to one-hundred-forty 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, D.C. 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.