On 27 February, Egab Editor Lina El Wardani was celebrating her birthday in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of El-Gouna when news broke of the war in Iran. By eight that morning she was back at her laptop — not filing stories yet, but checking on Egab's Iranian journalists, one of whom was trying to get home through streets that were no longer safe. Within two hours, commissions were coming in from international outlets.
Over the following weeks, Egab's editors along with our on-ground reporters developed story angles, edited and fact-checked every line, protected sources, and delivered coverage that ran nowhere else. Six commissions on the first day alone, then five to ten a day for weeks, in top-tier international outlets.
This is Lina, in her own words, taking us behind the scenes of Iran war coverage, what it looked like from the inside and why it’s a model newsrooms can use.
I left the food on the table. I went back to my room, set up my laptop and my phone, and started working. The first thing I did was not editorial. I wanted to know that our Iranian journalists were safe.
One of them was on his way to work in downtown Tehran when it began. He was trying to reach somewhere safe, and the bombardment was making it impossible. I told him to get to safety, and text me when he could. He said the internet was unreliable and he might disappear for a while.
I told him not to think about reporting. Just write what you can, on your phone or in a notebook: What you see; what you hear; the small things; what you had for lunch; whether you managed to make coffee. And when you have internet, send it, and I will put it together.
Once I knew who was safe, I sent an email to every outlet we work with. We are here, our editors and reporters are ready, tell us what you need.
Then back to the correspondents. Those who are safe, send me your ideas. Those who were not, get somewhere safe first.
Within an hour a shared document was open and every editor was in it, writing pitches. We sent, fast and targeted, matching each angle to the outlet most likely to want it.
It was a Saturday. Within two hours the commissions came back. Six on the first day. Then between five and ten a day, for weeks.
The thing I am proudest of is what we left out. We did not do the daily tally, the count of the dead each morning. Every wire in the world was doing that, and doing it better than a small team like us could.
Instead, we covered the actual lives of people. Every day, on the ground, interviews with Iranians living under bombardment. Not officials, not analysts, not numbers. What life was actually like, so you can smell the bakeries in our stories and hear the sound of the streets and the whispers inside homes.
We did heartfelt and solutions stories, on neighbors in Tehran taking in students who couldn’t get home. We did a daily dispatch focused on sirens, smoke and a city coming apart.
We did another story on bread queues and empty streets, and going outside as a calculated risk.
More stories ran in Wired, The New Arab, The New Humanitarian, TRT World, and Drop Site News. Over the following weeks we also placed with Zeteo, The Continent and Al Jazeera. Nobody else had this reporting, because almost nobody else had a reporter on the ground.
We sent a journalist to Minab, at the far end of the country, a twelve-hour overnight drive, and 1,200 kilometers from his home in Tehran, after an elementary school was bombed and schoolgirls were killed on the first day of the war.
At first, I did not believe him. His internet worked when nobody else's did. I asked where he was, asked him to send his location, asked why he could file when others couldn’t.
I asked for his recordings in Farsi and geolocated photographs. I did not stop until I was certain none of it was invented.
Everything we send an editor has to be true, and the moment that stops being the case we have nothing.
He'd sent me interviews with the families, but the first questions were too broad and they asked people how they felt.
I told him I had not sent him twelve hours overnight to ask a grieving parent how they feel about losing their child. Never ask that.
Tell me what the girls were wearing. What they ate for their last meal. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Describe the school. The roof. The walls. What is left standing.
He went back and did it. The result was the best coverage we produced, published by Drop Site News, followed by a second piece from Lamerd, where teenage girls were killed in a sports hall. That exchange is why I do this job. The best job on the planet.
Not one of these stories carries the reporter's name. That was for their safety, it was my decision, and some of them fought me on it.
A byline is how a journalist builds a career, and I was taking it away from them at the moment they had earned it most. They could see their stories being read and circulated and praised online and couldn’t take the pride in saying these are mine. “I saw your tweet and wanted to say this is mine, and brag about it but I couldn’t.”
We protected sources too. In that war, a name on a Tehran dispatch was not a credit, it was a risk, and it was a risk the writer would carry long after the outlet had moved on. No story is worth a target on your back. It is the hardest part of this job, and I have not changed my position once.
Meanwhile the reporter I had told to write about his lunch had almost no connection at all. He was buying expensive access to send me a few lines at a time. Those few lines became the Iran war diaries, and they were some of the best work we published.
The rest of it was not dramatic. It was relevance; applied a hundred times a day.
The right story, to the right outlet, with the right peg, at the right hour. Knowing which editor wanted the human texture and which wanted the analysis, and which one had a slot closing that afternoon.
We are a handful of editors, pitching, fact-checking, editing and writing non-stop, with on-ground correspondents whose access and network were built over years.
Editors would come back with queries. Reasonable ones, mostly, but some serve as a reminder that we live in different worlds. One editor asked: "Do we have a direct quote from Elon Musk commenting on VPN access in Iran?" Another asked what our journalist was carrying in his car when he was stopped at an IRGC checkpoint; why was he scared; did he have something to hide? Me: a phone.
That gap is exactly what Egab bridges. What happens when the people deciding what is plausible are a long way from where the story is.
A journalist who lives somewhere knows it better than a correspondent flown in for a fortnight.
Parachute journalism gets the facts sometimes. But it rarely gets the relevance, the history, and the texture, and that texture is where the truth of a war actually sits.
For a few weeks in the spring, that argument stopped being theoretical. International outlets took the reporting because there was no alternative testimony, geolocation and on-the-ground detail that no wire service or visiting correspondent could gather in the same week.
Not because we are cleverer. But because we were there, and because we were trusted enough to be listened to.
I came out of it barely able to stand up straight, and I would tell you it was worth it, which is probably the wrong lesson. The right one is that when local journalists are treated as the experts they are, the result is not merely adequate coverage. It is beautiful.
Egab has editors and correspondents already on the ground for the stories breaking right now. If you're commissioning coverage of a fast-moving story and need reporters who were already there before it made headlines, reach out to us through: https://www.egab.co/for-newsrooms