Alinejad joined the Ayandegan newspaper as a journalist in the summer of 1960, when he was a student at the Faculty of Social Communication Sciences. About a year later, he became the newspaper's deputy editor.

His collaboration with Ayandegan continued until October 1977, when he was fired from the newspaper for publishing a report on the poetry nights of the Iranian Writers' Association, whose members had leftist and anti-government views.

After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Alinejad returned to the press. For a while, he was the editor-in-chief of Sabz (“Green”) monthly and then the deputy editor of Tehran Mosavar magazine. With the Cultural Revolution of 1980, when the cultural spaces of Iran were purged of non-Islamic influences, Alinejad lost his job.

He joined the Transportation Industry magazine in 1983. Then, together with several other journalists, he founded Adineh Magazine in 1985 and became its editor-in-chief. Adineh was the most important and influential independent and non-governmental publication in Iran in the 80s and 90s.

He later continued his career in Donya-ye Sokhan, Safar, Zaman, and Payam-e Emrooz.

The books "From Franklin to Lalehzar,” "Why do you travel," "The scroll of pain and scorch," and "Selected Interviews from Ayandegan" are among his works.

Alinejad was also among the writers and intellectuals who were the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1996 in what became to be known as the "Armenian bus" incident.

The effort was part of Chain Murders and took place on August 6 of that year. The Ministry of Intelligence under then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani intended to kill a large number of Iranian cultural figures and send them all to the bottom of a valley in a staged bus accident.

The plot was hatched when the Writers’ Union of Armenia invited members of the Iranian Writers' Association to travel to Armenia for three days of cultural exchanges and poetry and press conferences. At the time, flights between Tehran and Yerevan took place only once a week and it was not possible for the travelers to stay for a week. Traveling by bus was arranged as the alternative. Ghaffar Hosseini, a member of the Iranian Writers' Association, became suspicious at the time and expressed his concern bluntly, "They are sending you all to the bottom of the valley," but others ignored him.

Twenty-one cultural figures, including Ali Babachahi, headed towards Armenia on a bus driven by Khosrow Barati, who was later identified as an agent of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. According to Koushan, close to dawn, passengers realized that the bus had stopped at one of the turns and the driver was not there. He was standing a little further away. He told them that he had fallen asleep, was scared and therefore got off the bus.

The writers then remembered Ghaffar Hosseini's prediction. Despite their strong fear, they decided to continue but have two people sit near the driver to monitor him. After moving about four meters, the driver sped up, turned the bus towards the edge and jumped off the bus. Masoud Toofan immediately took the wheel and Shahriar Mandanipour pulled the handbrake and managed to stop the bus at the edge of the abyss.

In a story published in the Aftab-e Emrooz newspaper on November 11, 1999, Masoud Toofan said that after the bus was stopped, the driver returned to the bus and claimed that he had gotten off to throw stones under the bus, to slow its movement. The driver then sat behind the wheel again and repeated the same maneuver.

"I immediately jumped behind the wheel and turned it," said Toofan. "I did not dare to press the pedal under my feet, I did not know if it was the accelerator or the brake. Finally the bus stopped, one wheel hovering over the valley.”

According to Massoud Behnoud, a journalist on the bus, they then informed the police station near the scene of the accident, and the passengers were taken there. Then, Mostafa Kazemi, an infamous interrogator from the Ministry of Intelligence, intervened and transferred all the passengers to Astara prison. There, the writers were released after being threatened and forced into silence.