About Maritime News Agency of Iran

Maritime News Agency of Iran

The Maritime News Agency of Iran, known by the acronym MANA, is Iran's specialist maritime news agency, launched on 11 July 2004 and publishing in Persian and English at mana.ir. Headquartered in Tehran — at No. 523, Aseman Tower, at the junction of Shahid Lavasani (Farmanieh) Street and Pasdaran Avenue — it describes itself as the first specialist maritime news and information network in the country, and its English reference profile calls it the sole news wire service covering marine news in Iran. Its beat is the whole maritime world of a country with coasts on the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman: shipping lines and fleets, ports and terminals, seafarers and shipbuilding, maritime tourism and the naval forces. Persian reference listings name the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, the national shipping company, as its owner, while the agency is formally described as a private news agency. For more than twenty years, when Iran's maritime sector has spoken — through its ports organisation, its shipping lines or its shipyards — it has very often spoken through MANA, and the international maritime press has quoted it accordingly.

Launch in 2004 as Iran's first maritime news network

MANA was launched on 21 Tir 1383 in the Persian calendar, corresponding to 11 July 2004. Its stated purpose, in its own reference profiles, is to cover the variety of marine, shipping, tourism and naval news, together with the other fields related to the maritime industry. The agency presents itself as the country's first specialist news-information network for the sea — a claim that reflects the media landscape of its founding: Iran in 2004 had general agencies in abundance and a powerful official wire, but no standing newsroom devoted to the industry that carried the overwhelming share of its foreign trade. MANA filled that space. It built its coverage around the institutions of Iranian seafaring — the Ports and Maritime Organization that runs the country's commercial ports, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and the National Iranian Tanker Company that operate its fleets, the shipyards and repair yards, and the ports from Bandar Abbas and Chabahar in the south to the Caspian harbours in the north — and it has kept that beat, in Persian and in English, ever since.

Ownership and headquarters

MANA's ownership is recorded with unusual divergence between its reference listings, and an honest profile should record the divergence. Its Persian Wikipedia listing names the owner as the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines — the state shipping company whose history, as its own leadership notes, runs back more than half a century — and classifies MANA as a private news agency. Its English Wikipedia listing gives the owner as the Marine and Ports Organization. What is not in dispute is the agency's character and address: a specialist agency working inside the state maritime sector, headquartered in northern Tehran at the Aseman Tower address on Pasdaran Avenue, and operating as the sector's news service rather than as an independent commercial wire. Its journalism bears that character out. MANA's correspondents report the signing ceremonies, conferences and official interviews of the ports organisation and the shipping lines from inside the room, and its interviews are the occasions on which those bodies' senior officials set out their plans — access that defines both the value and the standpoint of its reporting.

Coverage: shipping, ports, the Gulf and the Caspian

The agency's own profile sets out its territory: extensive coverage of maritime transport and of the news of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, the two seas between which Iranian seafaring is divided. In practice its reporting runs across the full maritime agenda. It covers the commercial fleet — its size, its average age and its renewal; the ports — their development phases, their equipment, their competition with the ports of neighbouring states; the shipbuilding and repair industry; seafarer and vessel safety, including the large traditional dhow fleet; fisheries and maritime tourism; and the naval and coastguard forces whose operations share the same waters. Its headquarters are in Tehran, but it states that it has correspondents throughout Iran and the region, and its stories are datelined accordingly — a correspondent's report from a signing in Astana or a port conference at home carries the same MANA credit. For a sector spread along thousands of kilometres of coastline, that correspondent network, rather than the Tehran desk, is the agency's real newsroom.

The English department

MANA publishes in two languages. Its English department is staffed, its profile states, by bilingual English-and-Persian speakers, and it provides readers with English versions of the articles, news, photographs, videos and analysis produced in the Persian department — though not necessarily every piece of the Persian output. The distinction matters for the agency's international readers: the English service at mana.ir/en is a selection, edited for a foreign maritime audience, from a larger Persian wire. Through it, MANA's interviews and reports reach the trade press abroad. The pattern is visible across the agency's record: a MANA interview with the head of Iran's ports organisation on post-sanctions port development, a MANA report on fleet renewal, a MANA correspondent's account of a ship-repair joint venture — each produced in Persian for the Iranian sector, then carried in English to the shipping world that does business, or competes, with Iran.

MANA as the maritime sector's interview platform

The agency's most characteristic product is the set-piece interview in which the maritime establishment explains itself. In MANA's post-sanctions survey of Iranian shipping, the head of the Ports and Maritime Organization set out port development plans that sanctions had not stopped — the second and third phases at Shahid Rajaei port, the Makran coast and Chabahar, and a conference staged to bring the private sector into bunkering — while shipping figures put the average age of the Iranian fleet at about fifteen years and argued for its renovation, and an industry voice described the national shipping line as one of the best-known Iranian brands abroad and a candidate for development through domestic and foreign capacity. In a later MANA interview, reported in May 2017, the ports organisation's deputy for maritime affairs described some 10,000 traditional wooden vessels working in Iran's commercial and fishing fleets in unsafe conditions, and traced the long history of the programme to replace them — the safety rules rewritten, the inspections tightened, the registration of new wooden craft restricted — an official history of Iranian maritime safety that exists in public because MANA asked the questions. No other Iranian outlet performs this function for the sea.

Quoted by the international maritime press

MANA's standing outside Iran is measurable in citation. The international shipping publication MarineLink, in its Iran coverage, reported the December 2016 agreement between the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization, the national shipping line and the tanker company to establish a ship repair and building joint venture expressly according to its MANA correspondent, and reported the shipping line's joint company agreement with Kazakhstan's KTZ Express — signed during the Iranian president's visit and intended to open a corridor from Iran's southern ports to Central Asia, Russia and China — on the same MANA credit. India Seatrade News reported the shipping line head's warning that, without fleet development, 70 per cent of Iran's international fleet would within ten years be unable to enter the developed world's ports, crediting the Maritime News Agency. Iranian transport media likewise treat MANA as the record: the transport news site Tinn, examining a ports organisation promise unfulfilled for twenty years, reconstructed its history from what MANA had reported at the time. When the world's shipping press needs to know what Iranian maritime officials have said, MANA is, in practice, the wire it reads.

Safety, traditional craft and the working sea

Beyond the boardroom news, MANA's beat extends to the working sea — and its reporting preserves subjects no general agency would follow for long. The traditional wooden dhow fleet, the lenjes that have traded across the Gulf for centuries, appears in its coverage as a standing safety question: thousands of ageing wooden, metal and fibreglass craft below standard, a danger to navigation that the ports organisation addressed over two decades with administered funds, replacement programmes, revised safety regulations for non-convention and small vessels, reformed inspection certificates and workshop standards, and stricter registration. The agency also carries the environmental and scientific side of the industry — ballast water management and its ecological risks, port and terminal economics, the Drewry analysis of container operators facing higher costs from larger ships and alliances. This breadth — from a dhow yard to a global terminal study — is what a specialist wire is for, and it is the part of MANA's output that most clearly justifies its claim to be its country's first and only maritime news network.

Place among Iran's specialist agencies

MANA belongs to the family of single-sector Iranian agencies that took shape in the 2000s — the agriculture wire IANA, the petro-energy service Shana, the book agency IBNA and their peers — each attached to an industry and each giving that industry a daily public voice. Among them MANA's sector is the one most exposed to the outside world: Iranian shipping works under sanctions, competes with the ports of the Emirates and Oman, and answers to international conventions, so its agency has always had to speak in two languages and to two audiences at once. Reference lists of Iran's notable news agencies include the Maritime News Agency of Iran in that company, and its twenty-year continuity — the same name, the same Tehran headquarters, the same beat from 2004 to the present mana.ir — makes it one of the most durable of the specialist wires.

Current operation

MANA remains active at mana.ir in Persian, with its English service selecting and translating from the Persian wire for international readers. Its correspondents continue to be the credited source for the Iranian maritime sector's announcements in the trade press abroad, and its interview platform continues to be where the ports and shipping establishment places its considered statements. For a directory of Iranian media, the Maritime News Agency of Iran stands as the country's specialist sea wire: privately described, state-sector owned on its Persian listing, bilingual, correspondent-based, and — by its own account, unrefuted in twenty years — the sole news wire service covering marine news in Iran.