What is Happening in Goltune? A Minute with the Editor

This is Sara Jamshidi, executive editor for Goltune online magazine. In our weekly post today I would like to talk with you, our dear precious readers and viewers.  

First, it has been an honor and privilege for me to be able to communicate with you through our news and views coverage in Goltune. I am so proud of my team.

We have been able to maintain our weekly Tuesday updates for more than 18 months. Goltune writers and correspondents file their stories from different cities in the U.S. and in the Middle East, bringing you the kind of stories you wouldn’t read anywhere else. Those include stories on women artists, entrepreneurs, dancers, as well as social and political engagers.

As you may have noticed, on our site we follow a peace journalism platform. In Goltune we address bias news values against Muslim women with  peaceful, beautiful, artsy fashion and lifestyle news for Muslim women. 

Second, I would like to talk with you about five exciting changes we have been conducting lately, including a Goltune website facelift, working with new writers, our Fashionable Muslim Women (FMW) project in Chicago, Goltune international Eid photo contest, and Goltune’s fundraising campaign for the FMW project this year.   

We changed and updated our Goltune website. For the past two months, Mehrshad Joneydi, Goltune web developer, and I have been working to design a new site from scratch. In our countless communications, we have been making decisions affecting Goltune’s design, construction, categories, sections, tags, and the platform’s overall look and feel. I know I have given Mehrshad lots of headaches! But in the end we managed to deliver a result that makes us both happy. In the process we asked for the opinions of my friends in the news and media industry, as well as Goltune’s writers and editors. I am glad we could finally finalize the look and structure of Goltune.

Just recently two amazing writers, Azadeh Torabi and Ebrahim Nabavi, joined our writers’ team. Azadeh develops and writes Iranian food recipes for Goltune. The recipes she provides are unique. Azadeh mothers Yasna, her two-year-old beautiful and picky daughter. She likes to develop fun recipes so Yasna can get used to Iranian dishes. Therefore, Azadeh pays extra attention to taste and ingredients in the food she prepares. We think that her approach to Iranian dishes may appeal to our non-Mediterranean readers, to0.. Look for a taste of  Azadeh’s recipes in the Persian Saffron section under Food.  

Our second writer is Ebrahim Nabavi, my dear editor-in-chief from back in Iran. We used to call him Davar in Zan Newspaper, Ms Faezeh Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s daily paper on Muslim women news and views, published in 1998-1999. Ms. Hashemi became the first woman representative with the highest popular vote in Iran’s 1996 Parliamentary election. She also brought Muslim women sport to the world.

Davar and I worked together at Zan News
paper. Davar is a prolific writer. He has published more than 73 books, and he has been writing political satire every day for the previous 17 years. Davar has promised to write about the Arab and Middle Eastern music industry and women singers for Goltune.

One of the very important updates on Goltune for the first half of 2015 is our annual Fashionable Muslim Women, or FMW, project. We conducted our first annual project in 2013 were we took picture of beautiful fashionable Muslim women in Madison and published their photos on our site. Please see the page. We were a bit quiet for 2014 due to some major decisions we were making for Goltune. But this year we’re going viral.    

We will be in Chicago during Eid Al-Fitr on July 18 to take pictures of those beautiful Muslim women who come to the city’s Eid al-Fitr celebration.

We are also opening up a contest for our FMW project this year. We want you to submit your Eid outfit following Goltune’s FMW photo guidelines. We will then publish the photos on our site. Our judges will go through each picture and select the three most qualified fashionistas. Their photos—with a special report and a special reward—will be published on Goltune. We know you don’t want to miss the opportunity.

And finally, the most important part of our activity this year is our fundraising campaign to fund the FMW project. In my next piece, I will tell you more about our fundraising effort.

All of us at the editorial team and management team are very excited about the new changes in Goltune, as well as our fundraising effort for Fashionable Muslim Women project. At Goltune, we thank you very very much for being an important part of our work!