The Virtual Eyewitness

While some doors in legacy media have closed, others have been opened by digital innovators such as Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, who founded Tehran Bureau from her parents’ living room in Massachusetts. Starting from a network of contacts she had developed on Yahoo! Messenger and Gchat, Niknejad has developed a vibrant news site on an authoritarian regime, with contributions from a pool of citizen journalists inside the country, as well as from those representing the Iranian diaspora.

Niknejad argues that her model can be more effective than “being there” in an authoritarian regime such as Iran, where foreign correspondents are closely monitored and end up censoring themselves to avoid expulsion. Her model is a vivid example of how new and old media can work together to report in challenging areas.