Black Box Iran – With Nilo Tabrizy

How do you report on a closed dictatorship with an oppressed yet defiant population? Journalist Nilo Tabrizy is an open-source investigative journalist who covers Iran for Reuters.

For Western media, it is almost impossible to provide an accurate picture of what is happening in Iran. One of the most reliable methods to do so is through open-source reporting, which uses publicly available data to reconstruct events and verify facts. Nilo Tabrizy previously did this work for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Among other investigations, she reported on the missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school at the start of the war, in which about 165 students were killed. How do you conduct data-driven investigations in a country notorious for internet blackouts?

Earlier, Tabrizy covered the Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrations that erupted in Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini. About these events, Tabrizy wrote the book For the Sun After Long Nights, whose Dutch translation, Zusters in Iran (Zwartjes & Labovic), was recently published. In conversation with Tabrizy, on the current situation in Iran and what it means to report on the country that she and her family once fled themselves.