Slavka Karakusheva
“There is no place in big
media in Turkey
for our small problems... Nor there is in the national media in Bulgaria .” This
is how Mr. Nahit Doğu started the conversation during the meeting in the small
town of Kardzhali
(Kırcaali) in South-Eastern Bulgaria in April 2015. He is the owner of and the
main contributor to a small ‘local’ online news agency – AjansBg. It aims at
publishing news from the region of Kardzhali as well as news from the “big
media” in Bulgaria and Turkey which
may be of importance for the local population. This local population consists
of 66.2% Turks and 30.2% Bulgarians (Census, 2011) and this makes Kardzhali the
town with the highest concentration of Turkish population in the country. Mr.
Doğu is a professionally trained journalist. He works as a correspondent of Al
Jazeera Turkey covering the
region of Bulgaria .
His professional experience has passed through some “big media” - the Anatolian
Agency (Anadolu Ajansı) in Turkey ,
Agency Focus and TV 7 in Bulgaria .
He started his first news website (weblog) in 1996 after he left the editorial
team of Нов Живот/Yeni Hayat [New Life] – the local newspaper published in both
Bulgarian and Turkish language. Later he continued reporting news in the blog
of AjansBg.
AjansBg is his personal idea
and one of the important projects in his life which he does “for the society,
for the people”, he says. He does not do it alone but together with a friend of
him. The agency publishes news in the fields of politics, culture, religion and
reports different events occurring in both national states – Bulgaria and Turkey . The news is often being
selected on one basic principle – to be useful and informative for the Turks in
Bulgaria or the Turks,
migrants from Bulgaria
to Turkey72. “People want to see themselves in the news. They want to see their
small world; they want to recognize their problems there. If they are able to
see this, they would watch or read the media. Especially if the media can
provide information that no other mainstream media does”.
The example of AjansBg is one
of the many similar online platforms which publish content targeting Turkish
speaking population in Bulgaria
(See Appendix 1). According to the last Census results 8.8% of the population
in the country or 588 318 people self-identify as Turks, while 605 802 (9.1%)
claim Turkish as a mother tongue (ibid). This is a relatively small market,
especially in relation to the nature of the medium – as an online platform its
content is limited only to those actively using computers, smartphones and
internet. Even if we add also the number of the migrants from Bulgaria to Turkey – a few hundred thousand
(with the same condition for internet usage limitation), to the target group of
the online news platforms – the market does not increase significantly.
Moreover, that traditional media play still an important role among the Turkish
speaking population in Bulgaria who, as bi-lingual people, are able to get
informed on one hand from the national and cable TV channels in Bulgarian but
also from the satellite broadcasted Turkish TV channels.
There has been significant
number of regional and national press in Turkish language. Acaroğlu describes
173 printed newspapers, journals and magazines in the period 1865 – 1985 (Acaroğlu,
1990). A similar descriptive attempt is done by Deliorman who lists 188 printed
materials in the years 1865 – 2009 (Deliorman, 2010). Despite the quantity
however most of them have existed just for short periods of time (1-3 years),
or those who survived longer have been published under the very strong communist
party supervision. We shall also mention here that there is a 10-minute news
programme in Turkish language on the Bulgarian National Television daily but
its time schedule at 16.10 p.m. makes it more a political reverence than a real
informative medium. For 2,5/3 hours daily the Bulgarian National Radio
broadcasts a special emission in Turkish language in the regions with compact
Turkish population and supports a special section of their website in Turkish
language.
What makes the difference
however between those traditional channels and the online news platforms is the
content – the first being engaged with national politics, events, and concerns,
and the second – informing on issues with local significance. This could be
illustrated with an example from the last elections in Turkey – while the
Turkish TV channels were following the election results city by city within
Turkey and showed a summary of the vote abroad, those in Bulgaria broadcasted
and commented only on the final election results, AjansBg was the first one who
published and commented on the results of the election boxes only in Bulgaria.
The piece of news started circulating in different Facebook groups of Bulgarian
Turks who were trying to understand and comment on the election results. This production
of locality is the big advantage that the ‘local’ online news agencies have
in competing with the mainstream media channels. They provide the services of
1) selecting only content which is related to Bulgaria from the Turkish media
context and only content which is related to the Turkish population from the
news in the Bulgarian media and 2) translating the selected content to Turkish
language so that people can read it in their mother tongue. 80% of
the content that AjansBg
publishes is in Turkish language and 20% in Bulgarian, says Mr. Doğu.
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