A note from the founder and editor of Iran News Now, Sam Razi:
In April 2009, I launched Iran News Now, as an independent news and analysis website covering Iran, Iranians and related topics of interest. When the protests broke out in Iran, in June of 2009, after a highly disputed and controversial presidential election, we covered them extensively, in real-time.
At the time, established western mainstream news outlets were being kicked out of Iran, making it next to impossible for them to cover the protests. In fact, the Iran protests of 2009 heralded a new era in how information was disseminated and distributed. Social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, and platforms like YouTube, were used by Iranians to share and spread videos that were being filmed by people on the ground in Iran using smart phones — bypassing Iranian censors and breaking the news before mainstream outlets.
I teamed up with pioneers of a new method of covering breaking events (live-blogging, also known as live-update reporting) to cover every major protest in Iran between 2009 and February 2011, when the long wave of protests that started with the disputed election came to an end.
Iran is a difficult and complex subject, with a lot of different interest groups jockeying over the framing of the narrative. When I started INN in 2009, just two months before the protests broke out, my intention was to provide news and analysis that went deeper than the norm with respect to Iran. In the U.S. and Canada, the predominant narrative on Iran had not changed much after the 1979 revolution.
For Iranian immigrants in the U.S., Canada, and the broader diaspora in general, the revolution made them pariahs within their adopted homelands. Almost overnight, they went from being a relatively respected minority, to being viewed with varying degrees of suspicion and fear. Of course this is a broad generalization, but generally, if you were of Iranian descent, living outside of Iran, you carried the burden of having to explain to people that the Iran that they had become familiar with from newsreels showing angry revolutionaries taking hostages is far from representative of who they were.
I started INN because I wanted to showcase and tell stories about Iran and Iranians to break this one-dimensional misrepresentation. INN is an English-language publication, intended for a broad audience including Iranians in Iran and in the diaspora, as well as for anyone who longs for information about Iran that goes beyond what you generally get from mainstream western media outlets.
Because of our desire to remain an independent, trusted outlet, we have intentionally remained small and operated this website since 2009 on an entirely volunteer basis. Due to limited resources, we have remained largely dormant since the protests that started in 2009 ended, but still reporting on various stories from time to time.
We have remained active via our @IranNewsNow Twitter account.
Thank you,
Sam Razi,
Editor
e-mail: editor @ irannewsnow.com
Twitter: @IranNewsNow