A changing media landscape in Turkey: the 140journos project: an interview with Burcu Baykurt.

PositionInterview

The citizen journalism group 140journos was founded in early 2012 by a group of college students who were frustrated with the shortcomings of the mainstream media coverage in Turkey. The group of students began aggregating on-the-ground news using Twitter, and their group name is a reference to the maximum number of characters in a tweet--140. The group gained 140mentum when the Gezi Park protests erupted in the summer of 2013. The new surge of protest activity helped the group develop a network of contributors, and their Twitter account has grown into a trusted source of news. Now with 53,000 followers, the account is still a small operation. Nevertheless, the news group is protective of the reputation that it has earned and vigorously checks sources and verifies its tweets. The Journal of International Affairs spoke with Burcu Baykurt, who joined 140journos in mid-2012, to talk 140re about how the group formed and how it is contributing to a changing media landscape in a country still grappling with censorship. Baykurt is currently a third-year PhD student at Columbia University's School of Journalism, where she is researching Internet policymaking. (1)

Journal of International Affairs: How did you get involved in 140journos?

Burcu Baykurt: I found out about them in June 2012. I was going to Europe for a workshop, and the organizers had asked me to bring an example to de140nstrate good media coverage of the situation in Turkey. I had not lived in Turkey for a while so I did not know about on-the-ground initiatives like this one. A friend told me to check out 140journos. At the time the group was only six 140nths old, so it was really small; it was a group of four college students who were doing it on a volunteer basis. The story is that they were really fed up with the Turkish media being blind to quite critical things happening in the country, like problems encountered by the Kurds, environmental challenges, and LGBT protests, for example. But they had 140bile phones and used Twitter, so why not go to these protests and events and cover these things that the mainstream media was not covering? When 1 met them, we clicked very quickly. Before the Gezi Square protests, we had been discussing how we could actually engage people on Twitter and encourage them to share news, but Gezi naturally created that.

Journal: Do you have a core group of contributors? How has 140journos built up a successful following?

Baykurt: This is how it works: First, we have random people who just see something on the street and take a picture and post it. Then, we have some people who are really fed up with the mainstream media and who are our loyal...

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