Abstract
Turkey is the world’s leading jailer of journalists and most media toes the government line. As
Bia’s humble headquarters in the city’s Beyoğlu neighbourhood resembles that of a small newspaper. Established with funding from the European Union, Bia, which stands for Bağımsız İletişim Ağı (Independent Communication Network), serves as a pool into which locally reported news from Turkish cities flow.
Since Bia was started 18 years ago, local media in Turkey has followed a global trend and struggled for survival. This, for a time, made Bia’s model and patronage increasingly vital for the future of Turkish journalism. But with the advent of social media and the mass imprisonment of journalists, opposition-leaning Turks are more likely to get their news directly from the Twitter and Facebook accounts of trusted correspondents, and Bia is struggling.
Local newspapers are in real trouble in Turkey. In October 2018, as the Turkish lira lost one third of its value against the dollar, seven local newspapers in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, announced they would no longer be publishing issues on Sundays and Özgür Ses, a local daily paper with a 14-year history, announced it would become a weekly.
All around the country, the rising price of paper has forced publications to reduce the number of pages, and many page designers and reporters have been laid off.
Expenses have increased by 150%, advertising revenues have fallen by 25% and some 900 local papers have closed since 2014. Only around 1,000 survive.
A lot of reporters have also been imprisoned by the government. Figures released by independent journalism platform P24 show at least 160 media workers are in prison in Turkey today, making the country the world’s leading jailer of journalists. Among those imprisoned are local reporters chronicling the violence between Kurdish militias and Turkish security forces in eastern Turkey. Other journalists have had to leave the country.
These troubles in local news are part of a larger crisis in Turkish journalism.
Over the past half-decade, mainstream Turkish media have largely caved in to state intimidation. Most newspapers toe the government line and others have gone out of business or have been forcibly shut down. This restrictive atmosphere allowed independent portals such as Bia to flourish.
The project originally emerged as a response to what Bia editors described as “the professional downfall” of mainstream Turkish media during the 1990s and out of a need “for real news sources for social opposition”.
“In its inception, Bia started an initiative to strengthen local media,” Haluk Kalafat, Bia’s co-editor, told Index. “Our goal was to slightly alter the centralist nature of Turkish journalism. We wanted to get proper news from local sources.”
To this end, Bia conducted education seminars and partnered with local papers and journalists. But Kalafat’s team now faces a new challenge as social media increasingly leaves its local reporting capabilities in the shade.
The Press Advertisement Institution, the authority which distributes official advertisements to newspapers, noticed the change and asked all local papers to become digital. Its president said he preferred “a total conversion” to digital and said 2019 would be the year of digital local journalism. He said this was also “the wish of [the] Turkish presidency”.
His comments showed how the general decline of local news, similar to what is happening in countries including Britain and the USA, also served a political purpose. Sacking reporters and “turning digital” to save local journalism – and with the lofty aim of modernising news – is, in fact, playing into the hands of the government.
That digital trend may benefit young local reporters who use social media, but it also endangers Bia’s model, which is based on journalism from first-hand sources processed with rigorous editing in the Istanbul office. As an outcome, reporters rather than editors now drive the news cycle.
İsmail Saymaz, a leading investigative reporter, has 1.2 million Twitter followers, a figure larger than the followers of Radikal, the paper he worked for until its closure in 2014. Pelin Ünker, who was the Turkish member of the reporting team that broke the Panama Papers story and who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, has a more modest Twitter following, but while propaganda snippets of pro-government titles don’t make any waves, readers engage with the kind of investigative journalism she provides.
Demonstrators protest the arrest of two prominent journalists in Istanbul, Turkey, November 2015. The newspaper headline reads: “Black day for the press”
CREDIT: Osman Orsal/Reuters
Ünker is freelancing these days, and many young reporters who emerged in the past five years follow in her steps. They may have no outlet other than Twitter, and no editorial input for their dispatches, but these only fuel their identification as local reporters.
Ece Temelkuran hosted a TV show, wrote a popular newspaper column and published novels before she was laid off in 2013 over a critical article. She has since built a massive following on Twitter, where her 2.6 million followers rely on her posts to get an opposition perspective on Turkey.
“Social media definitely makes it easier for the journalist and the reader to meet up,” Temelkuran told Index, but the disappearance of editorial oversight troubles her. “The lack of editing is horrible. [The] written word requires a second look before it is published or posted. Many consider this an unnecessary filter. I think they are not aware how powerful words can be and how irreversible some mistakes may be.”
Now living in Croatia, she believes Turkish local news faces numerous challenges. “The biggest challenge is the same as it has been in the old days: proximity,” she said. “The source, the reader and the journalist live too close to each other. There are no institutional barriers to protect the journalist from the reader and those who would be intimidated, or challenged, by the news. This has been the problem of local journalists all along. But with the false intimacy that social media creates, the problem seems to be more challenging than ever.”
Not long ago, Temelkuran edited a Turkish opposition newspaper, BirGün, where she worked with local reporters. “Things for Turkish media were not yet as bad as they are today,” she said. “But I remember writing in 2011 that all the Turkish respected journalists will end up in social media. That prediction, unfortunately, more or less came true.”
She added: “Being the editor of an opposition paper for a short while made me think about [the] prospects of journalism in Turkey from a different perspective. Especially in such outlets, journalism in Turkey today depends on personal sacrifice and [the daring] of the journalists. Financially, only young people who don’t have children can afford the burden of not getting paid properly. The staff is renewed constantly [and] this leaves the news outlets with incredibly enthusiastic, yet less experienced, journalists. That in itself causes problems in terms of sustainable credibility of the news outlet.”
Kalafat, the Bia editor, says people mostly follow its website for long-form features and commentary. Readers interested in developing local news, meanwhile, will “naturally go to social media accounts providing live feeds, or to Instagram accounts of photography initiatives, like Nar Photos, whose quality of photography they trust”.
This sounds like an admission of defeat if the social media of reporters has now become the primary source of local news while Bia is shifting its focus to human rights journalism. This way, the concern for getting local news right appears to morph into a concern for getting broader issues right, including the environment and human rights.
Bia’s main page now presents new sections: Human Rights Reports, EU Accession, Unemployed Journalists Chasing News and Male Violence Monitoring.
“[The] internet changes methods of journalism, but its fundamental values remain mostly the same,” Kalafat said, emphasising that if journalists uphold those values, local news can still thrive as a composite of sites such as Bia and vigorous reporting on social media.