Six years ago, Javid put the first edition of a bi-monthly magazine for Iranians in the United States. Those numbers have nothing to do with venture capital or dot-com marketing. Javid is still the only staff member and content is created almost entirely by the readers. Unpaid professional journalists and photographers, poets, academics, high school kids. Submit an article and you're likely to hear from friends you lost touch with 20 years ago.
Content ranges from news and analysis to relationships, soap opera to serious literature.
A complete archive shows, among many others, stories about new Iranian cinema, first-hand accounts from the war with Iraq, poems by Rumi and Persian pop songs. He once had a respectable job as a Washington correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation. His own writing, marked by a gentle, bitter-sweet humor, and his candid photo essays are a mainstay of the magazine. But his real genius is as an editor, or agent-provocateur for the virtual community. Javid is as ready to poke fun at die-hard royalists as at the mullahs, but as often as not, he'll simply offer a contributor's view and let readers respond.