This is not journalism: mapping new definitions of journalism in German exile

Abstract

This article aims to present a picture of Turkish journalism in German exile. By Turkish journalism, I refer to the production and circulation of news about Turkey, in Turkish and for a Turkish-speaking audience - primarily those living in Turkey. By German exile, I mean journalists who have migrated from Turkey since 2010 due to the country’s increasingly oppressive political climate, which has made journalism a dangerous profession there. Under-standing news in this context as the outcome of processes of transnational transfer of knowledge and experience from one regime to another, I ask how dissident Turkish journalists currently living in exile in Germany practise their profession from a distance, and what tools they use to critically engage with the overall political situation in Turkey. For this project, I have been carrying out ethnographic research in Berlin since November 2018. This research stands at the intersection of the anthropology of journalism and transnational migration. In the light of mapping the journalism scene in Berlin through this filter, I anchor historical foundations of the current migrant media scene where paths cross each other to understand their political references and to situate them in the context of Turkish-German migration. Then, I discuss the process of project-based journalism, by exploring the challenges and opportunities offered by the conditions within which journalists can practise their profession from a physical and temporal distance. Reviewing the choice of the audience that journalists aim to target, I also show how they meet a need for community media that had remained unaddressed in the Turkish-German context, in connection to the difficulty of establishing solidarities among themselves. Finally, I discuss recent debates on what journalism should be - or what happens to the expertise when activism and profession collide.