Radikal

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

~ the goodbye ~

Radikal put itself on the web on 28 March 1998, which is the same year I got a modem. That coincidence is most of my relationship with the paper. I read it the way everyone my age read everything after 1998, on a screen, without ever once paying for a copy of it.

It launched in print on 13 October 1996, published by Doğan. It ran in Berliner format until 2010 and went tabloid after that. The supplements outsized the paper carrying them: Radikal İki on Sundays was where the arguments happened, and Radikal Kitap was one of the few serious book sections in Turkish daily journalism.

The economics never worked. On 21 June 2014, after nearly eighteen years, the print edition stopped and the whole operation moved online. That was presented as a modernization and for a while it behaved like one, with a newsroom still attached to it and a readership that had followed the name across.

A Turkish newspaper going web only in 2014 was not unusual by itself. What made this one land differently is that the website was older than most of its readers' internet habits. It had been sitting at the same address since 1998, through dial-up and through TTNET, through every redesign Turkish media put itself through. Killing the paper and keeping the URL looked like the safe half of the decision.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it died ~

On 22 March 2016 the closure of radikal.com.tr was announced. A number of the staff learned about it from social media rather than from anybody at the company, which is how a striking share of Turkish media closures in that decade were communicated to the people they closed on.

The editor in chief Ezgi Başaran had already left on 2 December 2015 and Cem Erciyes had taken the desk. The site stopped on 25 March, less than two years after the presses did. The reason given was economic, and that explanation was received in the Turkish press with the skepticism that any 2016 closure attracted.

~ the archive ~

The part worth recording came afterward. Doğan sold its media operation to Demirören, and the Radikal archive went offline. Twenty years of Turkish reporting stopped resolving, taking with it the reference links in academic work and inside other newspapers' own stories. Enough public reaction followed that the archive was switched back on for a while. In July 2022 it went off again and stayed off.

So there are two deaths here and the second one is larger. The newspaper died in 2016 where everyone could watch it happen. The archive died in 2022 with no announcement, and an archive dying takes the earlier years with it, retroactively, in a way the closure of a newsroom never does.

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