Twenty years on, Radio Zamaneh has endured through transformation, building alternative journalism rooted in culture and social struggle, amplifying marginalized voices beyond state control and market logic.
O friend, O most singular friend—how many years old was that wine?
Forough Farrokhzad
When Radio Zamaneh was launched, the dollar had not yet reached 1,000 tomans, Ali Daei was still playing football, and Saddam Hossein was still alive. These are not merely nostalgic markers of “a bygone era,” but coordinates of a different historical order. Now twenty years have passed, and twenty years of survival for a Persian-language media outlet—especially without a fixed budget—is a striking record; a survival owed less to contraction and inertia than to metamorphosis and resistance.
A media outlet at twenty
A media outlet at twenty; every day with Radio Zamaneh: that alone is about ten years longer than Rooz Online, a platform that began more or less at the same time as Zamaneh but later exited the scene. Over these twenty years, so much has changed: neither the world is the same, nor its media; nor Iran, and nor what regulates the relationship between these three. Power relations, the circulation of news, and the relationship between politics, culture, and media have been radically transformed. And above all, Radio Zamaneh has long since stopped being a “radio.”
From broadcast to platforms
At the same time Zamaneh was founded, a massive shift was unfolding in the galaxy of media and communications—a shift that gradually moved away from the classic broadcast model (a clear “sender” producing content for a largely passive “receiver”) toward a networked, platform-based, algorithmic logic, where circulation depends on sharing, recommendation systems, data-driven visibility, and the connective power of users as nodes.
Facebook (2006), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) emerged and entered the world more or less alongside Radio Zamaneh: platforms that did not yet have a settled political role, but promised a new way of circulating news, representing power, and organizing socially. Media possibilities were unfolding globally whose consequences could not yet be fully predicted—from the democratization of expression to an unprecedented concentration of communicative power. Radio Zamaneh grew amid the opening of all these possibilities, but its seed had been planted elsewhere: the blog.
The blog as origin
The years 2001 to 2004 were the golden era of the Persian blogosphere: a space in which a set of bloggers, by weaving together political critique and personal narratives, had created a parallel network to move beyond the paradigmatic limits of the press during the Reformist era in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The blog was both a laboratory of language and a rehearsal of politics.
The founding idea of Radio Zamaneh was to create a new grammar of journalism based on the experiences and exercises of the Persian blogging wave; and precisely as that wave declined and the online space began to be securitized by the Islamic Republic, it tried to absorb this scattered archipelago into itself and turn it into a “new medium.”
In this way, a new medium—at least in terms of form—took shape in the geography of Persian-language media. In the second half of the 1380s (Iranian calendar), roughly 2006–2011 in the Gregorian calendar, amid the suddenly proliferating Persian-language satellite networks, it was possible to find a radio wavelength that was at once familiar and intimate, and yet profoundly different: a cultural radio whose programs’ and music’s “DNA” differed radically from the dominant media logic.
Reform-era cultural hegemony
In the post–2 Khordad atmosphere—after the election of reformist president Mohammad Khatami on 2 Khordad 1376 (23 May 1997)—the prevailing imagination was that culture (often framed as “civil society”) was an element capable of shaping everything. The years 1376 to 1388 (roughly 1997–2010) were years of inflated cultural discourse, the spread of Enlightenment-era intellectual quotations, and the popularity of concepts such as “discourse,” “semiotics,” and “tolerance and forbearance.” The common slogan was that “awareness is the foundation of liberation,” and the Kantian refrain—“man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”—was repeated as a world-opening formula. This horizon was also in tune with the political hegemony of the reformists.
Zamaneh, too, began its work in such a space and with an atmosphere that was more or less reformist. But very soon—consciously—it established its distance from the dominant cultural logic of reformism. The prevailing paradigm of Persian-language journalism—to this day—remains the model of the 2 Khordad press; and Zamaneh’s story over the past two decades has been a sustained attempt to construct an alternative to that model. This alternative first emerged from within culture and thought itself, by bringing onto the scene surpluses that had no place in the mainstream: forbidden subjects, horizons beyond clichés, marginalized concepts, and minoritized voices.
Festivals, bridges, and a shared field
Let us remember 30 Mehr 1385 (22 October 2006). About a month after Anousheh Ansari’s trip to space, and three days after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with the Angolan ambassador. On that day, the 12-hour “Intergalactic Iranian Music” festival was held in Zaandam, the Netherlands: the first Iranian underground music festival supported by a Persian-language media outlet. This was not merely an artistic event, but a symbolic moment of the linkage between politics, culture, and media in exile, made possible thanks to Zamaneh.
From that time on, by organizing poetry and literature festivals, Zamaneh built an unprecedented bridge between writers inside and outside the country. Linking the diaspora with society inside Iran, and creating a shared magnetic field between them, has been one of Zamaneh’s enduring components.
In this twenty-year odyssey, Zamaneh, through its emphasis on cultural surpluses, gradually became the voice of the voiceless. Without exaggeration, it has been distinctly pioneering in at least three areas: systematic defense of the rights of the queer community and LGBTQ+ people; persistent foregrounding of the environmental question; and the continuous articulation of the right to life against the death penalty. These were not accidental choices, but signs of a deep paradigmatic shift in journalism. To this list one might also add the reflection of issues concerning ethnic and national minorities.
From culture as critique to politics from below
Over the past decade, Zamaneh’s symphony has undergone another decisive turn: moving beyond culture as the language of critique and entering social politics as a field of action; a turn that meant saying “no” to the idea of neutral media. If Zamaneh today can claim a kind of alternative journalism to the mainstream, it is along a path that—at least over the last ten to twelve years—has moved toward placing “the social” and “the politico-economic” at the center.
Unlike the common speculation in mainstream media, Zamaneh, without losing its cultural horizon, placed its focus on politics from below. In the final years of the 2010s, when news of workers, teachers, and nurses struggled to reach mainstream outlets, Zamaneh reflected their news in a systematic way—and precisely for that reason, it was not surprised by the nationwide social uprisings of the lower classes in those years.
Over the past twenty years, alongside the transformation of media—from social networks to artificial intelligence—Radio Zamaneh has continuously tested new arrangements and tools for participatory communication: from launching the Zamaneh Tribune to using polling panels. What has shaped this outlet’s journalistic tradition, however, is its emphasis on an intersection that ties culture to class, the subjective to the politico-economic, and the universal to the lived experience of the lower classes. This is a singular model among Persian-language public media.
And today, at a time when independent media are under multi-front pressure and attack, it has produced an achievement that is precious and worthy of continuation.
From the “A Memory of Evin” dossier to the “Fiftieth Anniversary of the Siahkal Event” dossier; from labor reports to articles on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement; from special analyses of the war in Syria to sustained critiques of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear adventurism—Zamaneh’s archive contains seasons and special pages that remain contemporary and readable.
And perhaps this contemporaneity, this ability to stand in the present without severing ties with the past, is the secret of Zamaneh’s significance and popularity. In a world where media either dissolve into market logic or collapse under the pressure of repression, Zamaneh has shown that one can be independent without becoming rootless or losing one’s horizon.
Zamaneh at twenty is not the end of a path, but the confirmation of a possibility: the possibility of a journalism that, by emphasizing present crises, turns the cultural and social potentials of the past, through openings and acts of unveiling, into a mediation toward an alternative future.
