News of Iran, edited in Newton

The website is called Tehran Bureau, but it is not housed in the Iranian capital. It’s edited from Niknejad’s parents’ living room in Newton.

“Everybody thinks this is some kind of extensive bureau, but it’s just me,’’ Niknejad said yesterday as she sat alone at a small round table, tapping on one of two Apple PowerBooks.

Tehran Bureau is leading a virtual surge of information from Iran as the Islamic republic confronts the biggest set of public outpourings and protests since the Iranian Revolution 30 years ago.

“It’s kind of The Huffington Post of Iran,’’ said Robin Wright, a veteran diplomatic journalist who is now a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. Tehran Bureau, Wright said, “has offered a whole new dimension to covering Iran, which is off-limits to many journalists, and to most publications.’’

The English-language site has generated a lot of attention over the past few weeks as tensions escalated over allegations of electoral fraud by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. When demonstrators were shot and communication with the West was curtailed in a government clampdown, Tehran Bureau’s stream of news alerts and Twitter feeds became a valued source of information cited by The New York Times and other Western news organizations.

“I had no time to sculpt these into stories, so I just put them up on the website, and called it Tehran alert. People started coming to that page. We started putting up links to videos, too,’’ she said.

When her website tehranbureau.com was disrupted for several hours recently by what she believes were Iranian government censors, she used blogging tool Twitter “and started putting things out sentence by sentence, and people were stitching it together.’’

Niknejad quickly points out that while she has been the primary editor, many people in Iran and elsewhere are supporting the website, providing information and, more recently, donations. It has been an unpaid labor of love since its launch in November as “an independent on-line magazine about Iran and the Iranian diaspora.’’ She hopes to shift her base to New York soon and draw on reinforcements there.

Niknejad’s family emigrated from Iran to San Diego when she was 17, after living through the Iranian Revolution and the first stage of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. She went on to study law, and then got two master’s degrees from the Columbia Journalism School. Her parents moved to the Boston area seven years ago. She has not returned to Iran since she left in 1984, but she found herself pulled constantly toward her native land, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. This past September, she returned to Boston from nearly a year of reporting for an English-language newspaper in Dubai - a major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran - and resolved to launch a blog.

That blog evolved quickly into an ambitious website, enlisting a range of Farsi-speaking contributors drawn from Iranian-Americans and the diaspora in Europe as well as academics steeped in Iranian life. The site offers not just political coverage but a blend of cultural and economic reporting, intended to offer what Niknejad calls a fuller, more nuanced picture of the country than is usually available.

On the eve of the June 12 election, Jason Rezaian, an Iranian-American reporting on the election for Tehran Bureau, wrote a prescient piece from Iran about the youth militias, known as the Basiji, who are young supporters of Ahmadinejad and later turned on the protesters. The New York Times published Rezaian’s column about the Basiji on the eve of the election, shining an early spotlight on Tehran Bureau’s work.

Niknejad is determined to counter what she calls a simplistic coverage of Iran in Western media. She also wants to stand up to what she calls the fringe Iranian-American community that she says would like to hijack the unrest to try to overthrow the Islamic republic. “Tehran Bureau is not an opposition news organization,’’ she said. “I have tried to reach out to hard-liners, I reach out to Iranian reformers; I just wanted a more accurate representation of what’s going in Iran than is reflected in the media.’’

Niknejad noted that many Western commentators cite a simple urban-rural divide in Iran, and say Ahmadinejad could have won the election based on strong support in rural areas. But Tehran Bureau’s reports from areas outside the capital, including Shiraz and Isfahan, suggested that opposition to Ahmadinejad was also considerable in smaller cities and rural areas.

The site’s output has been uneven in recent days. Tehran Bureau and others have struggled with mixed success to work around those constraints, through proxy servers and even faxes. And within Iran, Niknejad noted, “a lot of people have gone quiet. And I don’t want to put anyone in an uncomfortable position.’’

Wright, who has written numerous books on Iran, including the recently published “Dreams and Shadows: the Future of the Middle East,’’ said the problem Niknejad faces in Iran, “like everyone else, is just getting material out of there, and people being willing to put their names on it.’’

Niknejad doesn’t know the current web traffic figures. On Twitter, Tehran Bureau has nearly 9,000 “followers,’’ many of them contributing from Iran.

But the site has drawn strong praise from Iranian analysts. Professor Hamid Dabashi, a renowned Columbia University scholar on Iranian culture, said of Tehran Bureau, “as history would have it, it has turned out to do unbelievable, remarkable work - not just in informing the American community, but through the magic of the Internet, also to make it available to people inside Iran.’’

James F. Smith writes about Boston’s global ties. His blog is at boston.com/worldlyboston. He can be reached at jsmith@globe.com.