About Iran's Metropolises News Agency

Iran's Metropolises News Agency

Iran's Metropolises News Agency, known by the acronym IMNA, is the news agency of Isfahan, owned by Isfahan Municipality and publishing in Persian and English at imna.ir. It began in 2006 as a news website in Isfahan and became a licensed news agency on 9 October 2012, when it received its licence from Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance with the municipality as licence holder; academic researchers now describe it as the main source of information in Isfahan province. IMNA's brief is the metropolis itself — municipal government, urban services, transport, environment, culture and sport — reported from inside the city administration that owns it, at a volume its own editors put at more than 160 news items a day. Its English service carries the full name Iran's Metropolises News Agency into international news indexes, where its reports on Iranian foreign and domestic affairs are listed alongside those of the national agencies. IMNA is the leading Iranian example of a municipal news agency: a city that runs its own wire.

From news website in 2006 to licensed agency in 2012

IMNA's history is documented in Iranian academic research. A study of sports coverage in Isfahan's media, published in the Sociology of Communication Journal in autumn 2022, records that the agency began its activity in Isfahan in 1385 — 2006 — as a news website, and that on 18 Mehr 1391, corresponding to 9 October 2012, it obtained its licence from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and was converted into a news agency, with Isfahan Municipality as the licence holder. The same study describes IMNA in its present position as the principal source of information in Isfahan province. The two-stage history — six years as a website, then formal licensing — is typical of Iranian online media of the period, but IMNA's licence holder sets it apart: not a ministry in Tehran, not a private publisher, but a city government, which has kept the agency as its own standing newsroom ever since.

Ownership by Isfahan Municipality

Isfahan Municipality is one of Iran's oldest and largest city administrations — founded in 1907 under its original name of Baladieh — and it maintains a substantial media operation of its own, centred on its media communications department, the city's newspaper and IMNA. The agency works inside that structure: its editors have been drawn from the municipality's communications leadership, and its former editor Saeed Saket went on to head the municipality's media communications department. Saket, reviewing that period, recalled that more than 550 press conferences had been held for the city's managers and close to 6,000 news items sent to the media, and he spoke of his work at IMNA as one of the honours of his career, describing its journalists, in his judgement, as certainly among the best in Iran. Ownership by the municipality shapes the agency's journalism in both directions: it has unmatched access to the city's managers, projects and data, and its editorial mission is openly bound up with the city's government — a position outside assessors have noticed, the State Media Monitor's 2025/26 review listing IMNA among Iranian outlets it considered potentially state-linked while noting that public documentation of such outlets' ownership and funding remained insufficient for a formal classification.

Newsroom, output and audience

At the scale described by its own former editor, IMNA is a high-volume wire. Saket recorded that more than 160 news items a day were being uploaded to the agency, and that its record daily traffic had passed 7.4 million clicks. Those figures, from the agency's own leadership, describe a newsroom organised for continuous online publishing rather than a daily bulletin: municipal announcements, council and mayor's office coverage, infrastructure and transport reporting, environmental coverage, cultural and religious life, and sport, filed through the day from across the city and province. The agency's reporters also conduct the long-form interviews through which Isfahan's officials explain policy — a recent IMNA interview with the deputy mayor for planning and human capital set out the city's smart-city programme, from intelligent traffic monitoring and electronic ticketing to the national licensing portal, in the agency's own question-and-answer format. IMNA's material is in turn ingested automatically by Iranian news aggregators, which republish its reports with the imna.ir credit line, extending its reach well beyond its own site.

A civic agenda: Zayandeh Rud, air pollution and unfinished projects

What distinguishes IMNA from a purely official bulletin is the civic agenda its editors claim for it. Saket stated plainly that a major share of the serious public demands raised in Isfahan over the Zayandeh Rud river, over air pollution and over half-finished projects was owed to the efforts of IMNA's journalists. Each of those three subjects is a defining grievance of the modern city: the Zayandeh Rud, the river that made Isfahan, has run dry for long periods, with devastating effects on farming east of the city; air pollution closes schools and shortens lives in one of Iran's most industrial provinces; and stalled mega-projects are the standing complaint of its citizens. An agency owned by the municipality that campaigns, on its editor's account, for the river and against the smog is practising a particular kind of local journalism — advocacy within the institution, pressing the city's own managers with the city's own evidence — and IMNA's editors present that record as the core of its public value.

Sports coverage and academic study

IMNA's place in Isfahan's media is firm enough to have made it a subject of research in its own right. The 2022 Sociology of Communication study took as its case the coverage of Sepahan — Isfahan's leading football club, one of Iran's most successful — in the two outlets that dominate the city's news: the newspaper Esfahan Ziba and the IMNA agency. That a scholarly journal chose IMNA, alongside the city's established newspaper, as the lens through which to study how a provincial sporting institution is represented says much about the agency's standing at home: for Isfahan's public life, including its sport, IMNA is one of the two reference sources. The study's history of the agency, quoted above, is also the fullest published account of IMNA's founding and licensing, an indication of how completely the agency's own province takes its presence for granted.

IMNA as a source beyond Isfahan

Outside its home province, IMNA functions as a cited source on Iran generally. The English-language Financial Tribune has reported Isfahan's smart transport programme — automatic vehicle location across 1,300 urban and 300 express buses, automated fare collection and smart citizen cards, built with an investment of 900 billion rials — on IMNA's reporting. A scientific paper on the Pasteur Institute of Iran's role in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic cited IMNA's published coronavirus statistics for Iran, taken from the agency's site in September 2022. Documentation of conditions in Iran's prisons during the pandemic, compiled by an international human rights organisation, cited an IMNA report of 10 May 2020 on the head of Isfahan province's prisons. These citations — a business newspaper, a medical journal article and a human rights dossier — show the range of readers who treat the municipal agency as a reliable record: what IMNA publishes in Isfahan is used wherever Iran itself is studied.

The English service and the metropolises name

IMNA's English service publishes under the name IMNA — Iran's Metropolises News Agency, and it is under that name that the international news index NewsNow lists its current output, filing its English reports on Iranian diplomacy and national affairs alongside the wires of Tehran. The name fits the agency's self-understanding. Although its licence, newsroom and ownership are Isfahan's, its subject is the Iranian metropolis as such: the government of a great city, its transport, water, air, heritage and public services, and the negotiations between city hall and the national state. Its English headlines accordingly mix the municipal with the national — a foreign minister's statement carried beside the city's own news — because for its readers the two are one story: what Tehran decides, Isfahan's streets feel. The batch of Iranian agencies among which reference lists place IMNA — between the book agency and the labour agency in Wikipedia's list of the country's notable news agencies — is general company, but IMNA is the only one in it that belongs to a city.

Sister outlets and the municipality's media family

IMNA does not work alone. It is the online and agency arm of a municipal media family whose print arm is the newspaper Esfahan Ziba, Isfahan's city newspaper, which had reached its eleventh year of publication by the time of the editors' review meeting at which IMNA's record was discussed; the two outlets' editors were farewelled and succeeded together at that meeting, under the municipality's media communications department. Together the newspaper and the agency give the municipality a complete local news system: print for the city's morning readers, a wire for everyone else, and a shared corps of reporters whose training the department invested in — Saket noted with pride that many IMNA journalists had gone on from the newsroom to postgraduate university study. For researchers and readers alike, the pair are best understood together, as the 2022 sports-coverage study understood them: the twin reference media of Iran's third city.

Standing and current operation

IMNA today is an active, licensed, municipally owned news agency publishing continuously in Persian, with an English service syndicated internationally. Its verified record — a 2006 start as a website, licensing in 2012 under Isfahan Municipality, a self-reported output above 160 items a day and record traffic above 7.4 million clicks, a claimed civic record on the Zayandeh Rud, air pollution and stalled projects, academic recognition as its province's main information source, and citation by business, scientific and human rights publications — makes it one of the most substantial local agencies in Iran. In a national media system dominated by Tehran, IMNA is the standing proof that an Iranian metropolis can run a wire of its own, and that the wire can become the first draft of its city's history.