In Iran, the Staying Power of the Press

"People are sick of political debate," said Ali Reza Kermani, who has weathered the closing of three newspapers and quit his day job to join Jumhuriyat. "They want their voices to be heard, not just political debate expressed in jargon they don't understand."

Kermani, for example, will cover civic organizations, citizens' groups formed to address problems such as galloping drug abuse. Pages will be devoted to making sense of culture, entertainment and other topics for a population that remains disaffected but no longer sees hope in organized politics.

"There is a possibility this newspaper might be able to express the voice of the majority of the citizens who have never had a voice," said the paper's political editor, Parvin Emami, a former political prisoner who shows not a single hair from under her black head scarf.

"I've been told our job is to support certain rights in general without getting involved with political struggle inside the state," she continued. "I believe this is a step forward for Iranian journalism."

The strategy plots a backdoor route to making daily newspapers relevant in Iran to an extent not felt here since Khatami was swept into office in 1997 with almost 70 percent of the vote. With his landslide came scores of newspapers, an explosion of free expression that turned every Tehran intersection into a newspaper kiosk, with vendors staggering under the weight of a dozen dailies drivers clamored to buy.

"In my entire life I have never experienced free journalism the way we experienced it after Mr. Khatami's election," said Goli Emami, a book publisher and translator not related to the editor. "This is one credit I will give him. We used to buy six newspapers! Six! And we enjoyed reading them. My God, such interesting articles. So much zest."

The vibrant press was intimately connected to the reform movement, sometimes to strong effect. In the late 1990s, Baghi wrote a series of articles on what became known as the serial murders case. His reporting exposed hard-liner hit squads as assassins of prominent reformers.

For his trouble, Baghi served three years in prison. But the killings stopped, and the country's main intelligence agency came under Khatami's control.

"We knew this was the most vulnerable point for the conservatives," Baghi said. "It was going to show who they really are. And after that, they stopped, because of public outrage.

"Three years in prison is nothing," he said.

It was, however, three years when Baghi was not publishing. Eleven other journalists remain in prison on a variety of charges, and many more have fled abroad. The minimum requirement for a free press is that journalists avoid running afoul of the law, a fact underlined when conservatives passed the draconian press law that was used to close Iran's 100-plus papers and even some Web sites.

Whether Jumhuriyat can avoid the chopping block is a topic of intense discussion in the three crammed rooms where the staff labors.

"I'm not very optimistic," said Marzyeh Soleymany, a translator who said she had seen five previous papers shut down. "And also knowing the editors here, it would be very hard to confine themselves to subjects that are not sensitive."

In Iran, everyone knows the red lines. A newspaper will be shuttered for directly criticizing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme religious leader holds ultimate authority in Iran. Also forbidden is any serious suggestion that it might be better to abandon the world's only theocracy in favor of representative democracy.