A newsroom for the curious —
every angle, every language.

Most news products show you what one press carried. Zaviye shows you the slice across all of them. We read the press in six flagship languages: Persian (فارسی), Kurdish in both Sorani (کوردی) and Kurmanji, Arabic (العربية, Modern Standard plus regional dialects), Turkish (Türkçe), Hebrew (עברית), and English. They are not equal in the data: English appears in most stories and Hebrew in very few, and the method page shows the current balance.

Beyond the flagship six, the aggregator pulls from 26 languages total across 502 sources — supplementary signals that catch the same story from angles the primary corpora miss.

The supplementary 20 catch what the flagship six miss for specific story shapes — cross-border Iranic and Turkic stories the state-aligned majors de-emphasise; South Asian coverage from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Gulf diaspora in Urdu, Pashto, and Hindi; Latin American MENA-diaspora reporting in Romance languages; EU-policy framings and eastern-European angles on Russia–Iran–Syria; the Pacific-rim view from Japanese and Traditional Chinese.

Story pages show which languages carried a story. When one language carried a large story that no other did, the Weekly Wire names it as a silence. So far every silence we have published was carried by English or Turkish press, and the method page explains why Persian, Kurdish, Arabic, and Hebrew rarely appear there.

The mechanic is the moat. Anyone can scrape the news in one language. Maintaining a live taxonomy of who carries what, and which positions matter, across 502 outlets in 26 languages, is the sustained editorial work that compounds.

Most consumer-media products are tuned around engagement metrics — time on screen, session length, push-response rate. Those metrics compound into real harm at scale: polarisation, attention fragmentation, outrage loops. We picked the quieter option at each decision point we control.

• The front page is ordered by a formula we publish: how many outlets carry a story, how recent it is, and how close it is to the region we cover.
• The default front page is the same for everyone reading today. Region, language, and topics you follow personalise what we emphasise — never what we publish.
• We send one Dossier on Sundays and we don't send anything else by default.
• No push notifications you didn't ask for. No retargeting pixels. No engagement points, badges, or streaks.
• Where other news products tune for time-on-screen, we tune for whether the reader came back next Sunday — not next hour.

The reader notices. That's the product.

The Sunday Dossier is the centre of gravity. One Middle East story, read across the languages that wrote it — sliced across four to eight dimensions of source identity, position, modality, and temporal pattern, with the hypothesis stated and the falsifiers named. A free Zaviye account is the subscription; the same email gets the Dossier and saves your reading history. No separate list. Sundays. Free.

The feed is the daily river — every story we surfaced today, filterable by region, language, and topic. It's the landing page; opening zaviye.news drops you straight into the day's coverage. Free.

Zaviye is published by Yash Mahmudi, a writer and designer working out of Berlin and the Tehran diaspora.

The bylined editorial — the Dossier — is signed by Zaviye as an institutional voice. We chose an institutional byline for the same reason The Economist, the FT's Lex column, and The Atlantic's unsigned editorials use one: the position is the publication's, not a single contributor's. It is the masthead.

Guest correspondents — writers in Tehran, Erbil, Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, and the diasporas — will rotate through quarterly, credited under their own bylines, as the publication scales.

Zaviye uses AI as infrastructure, not identity. Software reads, groups, and summarises the multilingual coverage we ingest, and until 30 August it also translated headlines into six languages (translation is paused for now), using language models that run on our own hardware and some we call through a cloud provider. The Weekly Wire and the Sunday Dossier are drafted by a model from that grouping. No person reads or edits the Wire, the Dossier, the summaries, or the translations before they publish. The byline is institutional, not a fake person.

We don't generate AI photographs and pass them off as documentary. When we use illustration that was AI-assisted — for a story card or a Dossier hero — we say so on the piece. Provenance is part of the design.