Gooya News
“Pluralism” is the quality that best defines Gooya News, an offshoot of Gooya.com, one of the first and most important Farsi-language online portals. It offers news and analyses by journalists and civil society activists of all political tendencies, and takes content from both the Islamic Republic’s official website and opposition sites. It also has a section for the Iranian news coverage of such international media such as BBC Persian, Radio Fara and Radio Zamanaeh.
Because of its pluralism, the Iranian authorities began blocking Gooya News a few years after its creation at the turn of the millennium. In 2009, it played a major role in the protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection, posting documents and photos of demonstrations that the government media were not publishing at the time.
The website’s claim to offer “Unbiased Iran News” is a fair assessment of its editorial policies. This editorial independence has a price, of course. Its employees are banned from Iran so the site has to be run from abroad. But it is based on a network of contributors throughout the country.
