For nearly two decades, Zamaneh Media has brought the people of Iran valuable information about their country, one of the most closed information ecosystems in the world. The outlet, which operates from the Netherlands and whose name means “time” in old literary Persian, is one of the most visible media platforms writing about Iran today, reporting stories in Persian and English on topics such as mass executions in prisons, child labor, and treatment of Afghan migrants.

“As a news organization, we have something that a lot of advocacy organizations, for instance, don’t have, which is reach,” said Joris van Duijne, Zamaneh Media’s executive director at the time of this interview.

The Iranian government is one of the world’s most repressive in terms of press freedom, ranking 176 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Thirty-five journalists are detained by the Iranian government as of September 2024, often under vague and arbitrary laws such as offending religious and political leaders.

While a 1985 press law expressly forbids censorship in Iran, in practice press freedom has been severely curtailed in the country, and authorities have instigated several crackdowns on the press over the years. The repression only intensified following nationwide protests in 2022 in response to the killing of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, by the state’s morality police.

We spoke with van Duijne about how Zamaneh Media has evolved since its founding in 2005, the role it plays in reporting stories from within Iran for the outside world, and the challenges it faces operating in one of the world’s most restrictive press freedom environments.

The evolution of Iranian exiled media

With very few independent Iranian media organizations operating within or outside Iran in 2005, Zamaneh Media filled a critical gap when it launched.

In light of the threats to press freedom in Iran, in 2004 an Iranian-Dutch Member of the Dutch Parliament, Farahnaz Karimi, introduced a motion to support Iranian media. Zamaneh Media was one of the projects created as a result of the motion, initially as a shortwave radio service broadcasting into Iran.

From the start, the young newsroom used shortwave to bypass government censorship and deliver information directly to Iranians. When the Iranian government began blocking its signal, Zamaneh Media responded by constantly switching the frequencies it used. This, however, increased the cost and difficulty of its operation.

“[Broadcasting] became increasingly expensive. We had to maintain more and more frequencies. You end up with a discoverability issue if you change frequencies at some point, multiple times a day,” van Duijne said.

Zamaneh Media launched its website in 2006, and in the years that followed phased out its shortwave to operate primarily as a digital platform. Their content priorities changed in tandem: the outlet moved away from time-sensitive news updates to instead produce feature reporting around philosophy, arts and culture, as well as politics and human rights in Iran.

The shift, explained Van Duijne, allowed the newsroom to redirect resources and staff time away from competing with other organizations for scoops, to publishing longer-form stories.

“In the beginning, when there was nothing else [in the exiled Iranian media landscape], we needed to serve everybody,” Van Duijne said. “In this changing media landscape for Iran, we have started to redefine our purpose […] and say if that’s our role, that’s our role.”

Serving audiences in Iran

Zamaneh Media’s primary audience — two-thirds, according to van Duijne — are Iranians inside Iran. Keeping a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the country is a chief challenge for the newsroom as it strives to inform these readers.

“How you maintain the close connection with what is going on on the ground is the tricky part,” van Duijne said.

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by Devin Windelspecht and Stratton Marsh, International Journalists’ Network