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. Every story we publish is built from the actual coverage in our flagship corpora — Persian (فارسی), Kurdish in both Sorani (کوردی) and Kurmanji, Arabic (العربية, Modern Standard plus regional dialects), Turkish (Türkçe), Hebrew (עברית), and English.

Beyond the flagship six, the aggregator pulls from 26 languages total across 497 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.

On every story page you can see who covered it, who didn't, and how each press framed it. When the coverage is asymmetric — when one cohort filled pages and another ran nothing — we name the silence. The Persian press carried it. The English wire did not.

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 497 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.

• A human picks what goes on today's front page, and you can see who.
• 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 algorithmic feed loops. 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 Glossary is a growing dictionary of words that don't arrive cleanly in English — ta'arof, xwebûn, wasta, ghorbat. Each word is a door. We explain the door, not the whole room. 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, with collaborators who carry the Persian, Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish reading.

The bylined editorial — the Dossier and the Glossary — 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. The multilingual coverage we ingest is researched, drafted, and reasoned across by AI tooling that runs on our own hardware; every piece that reaches the page is structured, edited, and polished by editorial before it ships. 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 Letter hero — we say so on the piece. Provenance is part of the design.