About Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency

Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency

The Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency, known as CHN, was a specialist Iranian news agency that reported the country's cultural heritage, archaeology, handicrafts and tourism. Based in Tehran and publishing in Persian, with English-language heritage reporting circulated abroad under the CHN and CHTN names, it operated within the orbit of Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism Organisation — the body, universally known as ICHHTO, that was responsible for Iran's museums, historic sites and tourism policy. At its documented height in 2007 CHN employed 100 journalists and photographers, a newsroom scale that made it one of the largest specialist agencies in the country, and it entered a formal partnership with the United Nations World Food Programme. Its Persian bulletins were read closely enough that a March 2009 CHN report on a ban on archaeologists giving interviews was translated and republished in London by the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies at SOAS. CHN no longer operates as the heritage wire it was; the Iranian culture ministry's heritage news is today carried by a separate, later agency. This profile records CHN as it can be verified: an early, ambitious attempt to give the world's oldest continuously inhabited cultural landscape a news agency of its own.

Origins and early years

CHN was already working in the first years of the twenty-first century. The artist and writer Solmaz Naraghi, in her professional biography, records that she worked as a reporter for the Cultural Heritage News Agency from 2002 to 2005, which places the agency's newsroom in operation by 2002. By 2004 the agency was publishing English-language features on Iranian heritage cities through its website at chnpress.com — among them a 2004 feature on Shiraz, the historic city of Fars province, which was still being cited in academic tourism research years later, in a study of community perceptions of tourism that drew on the agency's reporting and accessed the chnpress.com text in 2008. The photographer Maryam Rahmanian, who returned to Iran in 2006, also worked for the Cultural Heritage News Agency in the years after her return, alongside Iranian and foreign press work that later appeared in international magazines and newspapers. These fragments — a reporter's dates, a photographer's credit, a cited feature — are the surviving traces of a newsroom that was, in its own time, the standing source for heritage news in Iran.

Place within the cultural heritage organisation

Reference listings of the Cultural Heritage Organization of Iran name the Cultural Heritage News Agency among the organisations it administered, alongside its public relations office, its documentation centre, its research centre for the conservation of cultural relics, the Iran Tourism and Touring Organization and the Noruz Anthropology Research Center. ICHHTO's remit explains CHN's beat. The organisation administered Iran's great museums and palaces — the National Museum of Iran, the Golestan, Saadabad and Niavaran complexes in Tehran, the Pars Museum in Shiraz and others — and ran archaeological projects at sites including Masooleh, Haft Teppe, Chogha Zanbil, Sultaniyeh, Bisutun, Takht-e Soleyman, the Bam citadel, Persepolis and Pasargadae. It maintained branches in every province of Iran. A news agency inside such an organisation did not have to search for its subject: every excavation season, every restoration, every museum opening and every threat to a historic site in a country with tens of thousands of registered archaeological and historical places passed, in principle, across its desk.

A newsroom of 100 journalists and photographers

The clearest measure of CHN's scale comes from the United Nations. Announcing its partnership with the agency in May 2007, the UN World Food Programme described CHN as a news agency whose 100 journalists and photographers specialised in covering issues related to Iran's cultural heritage and tourism. A hundred-strong specialist newsroom is large by the standards of Iranian agencies of the period, and it indicates blanket coverage rather than a small features desk: photographers as well as reporters, working a beat that ran from excavation sites in the provinces to tourism policy in Tehran. It was that capacity — a standing national network already expert in heritage and tourism — that the United Nations sought to borrow in 2007, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for the agency's standing in its active years. CHN's bylines from the period appear across the Iranian press, and heritage stories credited to CHN continued to be carried by other outlets, including a 2014 Financial Tribune report on the national tour leaders' festival that cited the Cultural Heritage News Agency's reporting on the event's venue and programme.

The Tourism against Hunger partnership with the World Food Programme

In May 2007 the World Food Programme announced a partnership with CHN and the launch, under an agreement signed the previous week, of a joint campaign called Tourism against Hunger. Under the agreement, CHN would provide news coverage of all relevant WFP activities throughout Iran, and would put its technical capacity at the programme's disposal: technical assistance to develop WFP's Farsi and English website, translation services, and help in developing a local advocacy strategy that was to include the production of news packages, publications and advertisements. The WFP's representative in Iran, Robert Hauser, presented the agreement as a model of how the programme could work with the private sector in raising awareness. The context gave the campaign its logic. WFP had opened an office in Iran in 1971, suspended its work after 1979 and resumed activities in 1987 at the government's request; by 2007 it was providing food assistance to more than 26,000 Afghan refugees and 4,800 Iraqi refugees in Iran, and in 2003 it had provided emergency food assistance to nearly 100,000 survivors of the Bam earthquake. CHN's role was to connect that humanitarian operation to the Iranian public through the one subject its readers already followed — travel and heritage — and to raise both awareness and funding for relief work.

Reporting the 2009 ban on archaeologists' interviews

CHN's best-documented single story shows both its position and its limits. In March 2009 ICHHTO, under its director Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, banned all active Iranian archaeologists from giving interviews or revealing information about the organisation or the state of Iranian archaeology, directing enquiries instead to its public relations office. The Persian service of CHN reported the ban and the reaction to it, and its bulletin — published in Persian at chn.ir — was translated and republished on 13 March 2009 by the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies in London. The CHN report recorded that heritage matters had come to be taken seriously by the Iranian media, that most Iranian newspapers by then had an archaeology or heritage section, and that archaeologists had become the bridge between ICHHTO and the media, educating the public about the significance of heritage and archaeology. Media scholars quoted around the story, including a lecturer in media science at Allameh Tabataba'i University, argued that expert comment was the archaeologists' right and that a public relations office could not substitute for it. The episode placed CHN in an unusual position: an agency of the heritage establishment reporting, accurately and critically in effect, on that establishment's attempt to control the flow of heritage news.

CHN as a record used by scholars

Specialist agencies earn their keep as archives, and CHN's output entered the scholarly record in its own field. Tourism researchers studying the economic and environmental impacts of tourism on local communities cited the agency's 2004 Shiraz feature, published on chnpress.com, in work that circulated through academic repositories for years afterwards. The London-based Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies, which monitored Iranian archaeology for an international readership, treated CHN's Persian bulletins as source material worth translating in full. For heritage professionals, CHN's coverage of the tour-guiding profession — including the national tour leaders' festivals held in Tehran, Yazd, Tabriz, Ramsar, Khuzestan, West Azerbaijan and Kerman before the 2015 gathering in Mashhad — documented the professionalisation of Iranian tourism from inside. A news agency whose reports are still being footnoted after its own website has disappeared has left a verifiable residue in the literature, and it is largely through that residue that CHN can be profiled today.

Names, websites and the later heritage wire

CHN published from chn.ir in Persian and from chnpress.com in its early English work, and its English reporting also circulated under the CHTN name — a 2009 English report on Isfahan's Safavid heritage, carried abroad, was credited to CHTN. The naming matters because a different and still-active agency now holds the heritage beat. The Miras Aria news agency, which publishes at chtn.ir and describes itself as the specialist agency for cultural heritage, tourism and handicrafts and the official reference for news of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts, was founded in 2006 by a company whose major shareholder was the then cultural heritage organisation together with the Touring and Automobile Club of Iran; it received its formal licence from the culture ministry in January 2021, with the ministry as licence holder. Miras Aria is a separate institution from CHN, with its own founding, licence and management, and its history should not be merged into CHN's. What the two share is a beat and a parent administration: when the heritage organisation became a full ministry, its official news continued through Miras Aria, while CHN itself faded from the record as an operating wire.

Closure and legacy

No formal announcement of CHN's dissolution has been traced, and this profile does not invent one. What can be verified is the shape of its career: a specialist agency at work by 2002, publishing English heritage features by 2004, employing 100 journalists and photographers and partnering with a United Nations agency by 2007, reporting sensitive heritage politics in 2009, and still being cited as a reporting source in 2014 — after which its own web presence disappears and the ministry's heritage news passes to the separately founded Miras Aria service. CHN's legacy is the model it proved. It demonstrated that archaeology, conservation and tourism in Iran could sustain a full-time national newsroom; it carried heritage news into Iranian homes, in its own report's phrase, by making archaeologists and sites into standing news; and it showed, in the Tourism against Hunger campaign, how a cultural agency's audience could be mobilised for a humanitarian cause. In a media directory it belongs in the past tense, as the first specialist heritage wire of modern Iran.