About Azad News Agency

Azad News Agency

The Azad News Agency, known by its acronym ANA, is an Iranian news agency owned by the Islamic Azad University and based in Tehran. Publishing in Persian, English and Arabic through its website at ana.ir, it specialises in science, technology, higher education and the knowledge-based economy, while also carrying wider national news. The agency describes itself as the first and largest academic media outlet in Iran, and as the largest and most reliable official online medium in the country in the fields of science, technology and the knowledge-based economy. Its position is distinctive within the Iranian media landscape: rather than belonging to a ministry, a broadcaster or a political faction, ANA is the news arm of a university system, and its reporting is built around the research, teaching and innovation activity of that system and of Iran's wider scientific community.

Founding and institutional basis

ANA was established by the Islamic Azad University in May 2004. The agency's own account of its history dates its establishment to 4 May 2004 and presents it as a deliberate attempt to give the university a professional news voice of its own. It was launched at the university's human sciences department, and its founding head explained the purpose in terms of developing the dissemination of information and changing the way university activities were reported, with the agency organised to work across the diverse departments of the Islamic Azad University. ANA operates under an official licence from Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, licence number 23136, and is registered with the General Directorate of Registration of Companies and Non-Commercial Institutions under number 21174. Those licences place it formally inside Iran's regulated press system, in which news agencies require state permission to operate.

Governance and leadership

Since 2004, ANA has operated under the direct management of the president of the Islamic Azad University, who is the university's highest decision maker. The university president appoints the agency's managing director and the members of its board of directors, which means the agency's leadership ultimately answers to the head of the university rather than to an editor-in-chief independent of the owner. Mohammad Mahdi Kheirjou is recorded as the agency's chief executive. The university presidents under whom ANA has worked have themselves been prominent national figures, and the agency's coverage of the university's leadership is correspondingly central to its output. In June 2025, for example, ANA reported the assassination of Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, the president of the Islamic Azad University and a theoretical physicist, in an Israeli raid on Tehran, noting in its own report that the agency is affiliated to the university whose president had been killed.

The parent university

To understand ANA's scale it is necessary to understand its owner. The Islamic Azad University is a private university system headquartered in Tehran, established on 21 May 1982 and founded by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who later became president of Iran. It is one of the largest comprehensive university systems in the world. ANA's own reporting has described a system with some 1.7 million students studying at its branches, more than five million graduates over its history, more than 400 branches across Iran and branches abroad in Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and England. The university lists ANA among its media, alongside the Farhikhteghan newspaper and the Isca News Agency, a separate student-oriented news service. A news agency serving an institution of that size has a built-in national newsgathering footprint that few Iranian outlets can match.

National network and languages

After more than eighteen years of activity, ANA says it produces and publishes textual and multimedia content and has representatives in more than 300 cities across Iran. That network follows the geography of the university itself, whose branches reach into provincial cities and towns where national news agencies often have no permanent presence. The agency publishes in three living world languages, Persian, English and Arabic, with its English service at ana.ir carrying the dateline form "TEHRAN (ANA)" on its stories. The English output is heavily weighted towards science and technology reporting, translating the agency's core specialism for an international audience, and it has included monthly round-ups of Iranian science and technology news.

Science and technology reporting

Science reporting is the heart of ANA's identity. Its English-language pages are filled with stories from Iranian laboratories, exhibitions and research centres, typically built around interviews with the researchers involved. In November 2025 it reported from the 16th International Nanotechnology Exhibition in Tehran, where the university's director-general for industry and society described work on flexible solar panels that could be integrated into fabrics, smart textiles coated with nanomaterials, printed and woven circuits, self-heating clothing and colour-changing fabrics. Other reports have covered the production of aluminium fluoride at the university's Khomein branch, described by the provincial university president as a vital material for reducing the melting temperature of aluminium, and a multi-faceted research project on the transfer of technical know-how for making special explosives for the safe, controlled demolition of structures, carried out with the Iranian defence ministry and reported from the university's Shahroud branch. Stories of this kind give ANA a specialised science wire function that general Iranian agencies do not perform.

Education and skills coverage

Alongside research news, ANA covers the educational mission of its parent system in detail. In October 2022 it reported that the Islamic Azad University would represent Iran at the 46th WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai, with six students competing in cyber security, web-based management systems, piping and heating, graphic design and mechanical engineering. The report explained that the university had signed a memorandum of understanding in the Iranian year 1399, corresponding to 2020-21, with the Technical and Vocational Training Organization to hold joint training, research and competition events, reflecting the university's emphasis on skill-based education. The agency similarly reported the university's plans, announced in 2022, to develop an atlas of social harms, with nine research centres across the country activated in a consortium covering drug abuse, behavioural disorders, slum-dwelling, psychology, health and the issues of elderly people. Such coverage shows ANA functioning as the record of the university's academic planning as much as a conventional news service.

The Homiana innovation house

In July 2022 ANA obtained a licence from Iran's Vice Presidency for Science and Technology, licence number 1136, to establish a creative and innovation house. Under that permission it created a centre for the acceleration and development of technological, innovative and creative cultural and social businesses, titled the Creative and Innovation House of ANA Media, or Homiana. The centre occupies a space of some 600 square metres and is capable of hosting 70 entrepreneurs and new-idea generators in individual and group formats. The venture marked a notable diversification: the news agency moved beyond reporting on Iran's innovation economy to incubating parts of it, consistent with its self-presentation as a media organisation embedded in the knowledge-based economy rather than merely observing it.

Editorial character and role

ANA's editorial character follows from its ownership. Its motto, "self-belief, hope and movement", is shared with the wider university's outlook, and its coverage of the Islamic Azad University is institutional and supportive, reporting the system's announcements, appointments, agreements and achievements. At the same time, its science and technology brief takes it into territory where reporting is primarily explanatory: new materials, medical advances, robotics, nanotechnology and energy research feature constantly, sourced from Iranian universities and research institutes beyond its parent system as well as within it. For readers outside Iran, its English service is one of the few continuous windows on Iranian academic research output, a field in which Iran publishes extensively but which receives limited coverage in general international media.

Place among Iranian news agencies

Iran has a crowded field of news agencies, including the official Islamic Republic News Agency, the semi-official Fars, Mehr, Tasnim and ISNA services, and a range of specialist agencies attached to ministries and institutions. ANA belongs to that institutional category but with an academic rather than governmental parent, and it is listed among the notable Iranian news agencies in international reference works. Its combination of a 300-city reporting network, three-language publishing, formal press licensing and a defined science and university brief makes it a significant specialist voice. More than two decades after its founding in 2004, it remains the principal news agency of the Islamic Azad University and a reference point for news about Iranian higher education, science and technology.