Al Jazeera Türk

» see aljazeera.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

this grave is in my language and inside my own country, which does not happen often in this archive. al jazeera türk published in turkish, out of istanbul, for readers like me. i had a desk job in ankara through its whole run and i read turkish news on the web every working day, the way anyone with a browser open all day does.

the site went live on 22 january 2014 with a newsroom of more than fifty people and a digital magazine attached to it. the plan behind it was older and much bigger. al jazeera had bought the old cine5 channel from the turkish savings deposit insurance fund in 2011 for 40.5 million dollars, after an earlier bid of 21 million was turned down, and the website was meant to be the warm-up act for a twenty four hour turkish news channel.

the channel never broadcast. a studio went up in topkapı, the launch target slid out of late 2014 into nothing at all, and the obstacles were political rather than technical. al jazeera would not call the pkk a terrorist organization in its own copy, which put it against the turkish foreign ministry from 2012 onward. the main local investor withdrew from the partnership and the editorial head resigned.

what it looked like from the reader side was a newsroom with no obvious position in the domestic fight. turkish media by 2014 was already sorted into camps you could identify from the headline alone. a qatari-funded turkish desk did not sit cleanly in either of them, which is both the reason it was worth opening and the reason it was impossible to keep.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the channel that never aired ~

buying a broadcast license in turkey is not a thing you do casually. cine5 had been confiscated by the state deposit fund when its owner went bankrupt, and al jazeera bought it out of that estate. the license was the expensive part and the studio was the visible part. neither one ever put a signal out.

the digital-first order was unusual for al jazeera at the time. every other edition had been a channel that later grew a website. this one was supposed to be a website that later grew a channel, which in 2014 read as a sensible reversal and now reads as the only half that ever shipped.

~ the day it stopped ~

on 3 may 2017 the site posted a farewell thanking its readers and its staff, and stopped. al jazeera said the turkish operation was ending as part of labor optimization, and added that turkey would remain important to its news coverage. it picked world press freedom day to do it, which nobody in doha appears to have checked.

the timing matters for a second reason. the saudi and emirati blockade of qatar, the one that came with a public demand to shut al jazeera down entirely, began on 5 june 2017. al jazeera türk was already dark a month before that. whatever killed it was internal to the doha and ankara relationship rather than imposed from the gulf.

~ what got buried with it ~

the money was never the constraint. seventy five million dollars had gone in by the end and the twitter account was approaching a million followers, so this was not an outlet nobody read. what it could not survive was being a guest publication in a country where its owner had a much larger relationship to protect. former staff have pointed at the gezi park coverage in 2013 as the moment ankara stopped trusting the network, and at doha's preference for keeping the al jazeera brand intact over keeping one local edition alive.

al jazeera america closed in april 2016 and al jazeera türk closed thirteen months later. two well funded language editions of the same network, neither one killed by a lack of audience. the pattern that survives both of them is simple enough. a foreign newsroom publishing in the local language lives at the pleasure of two governments, and only needs one of them to lose interest.

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