Feature, Is there a Turkish one?

Today, let's talk about journalism.

The feature, the final form of investigative journalism does not work in Turkey. Last week, we learned the characteristics of a feature, how we should write or which criterion we are going to use for feature writing, during a course in Kingston University. I realized again, the form of feature does not exist in Turkey. Yes we have “exclusive news” but no feature writing at all. Very reason behind of the this problem is that the managers of the media companies don’t want to invest money in newspapers and give more time to the journalists for investigations.

Main stream Turkish newspapers generally prefer shorter stories, of course with less sources and less information, because they believe that their target group might get bored while reading long paragraphs and quotes from different people.

To western media, It is a necessity to use some part of the newspapers as feature to expose social issues, human stories or deeply complicated problems. They make their readers loving longer stories with colourful language and responsible journalism.

Circulation numbers in Turkey go down because actually we’re not doing our jobs properly.

Newspapers generally take news stories from national agencies and if necessary translate them from foreign news sources. Editorial desk doesn’t trust their colleagues to get true and consistent articles-sometimes they are right, small portion of journalists even were not graduated from the university, they learned the profession by experience. Thus, advertisement sections in the pages are very large and we don’t have space to publish examples of investigative journalism, rest of the space is using by the editors catching up daily boring stories like a complete page for PM Erdogan’s already broadly broadcasted speech.

So as a Turkish journalist at least I try to understand what are the best ways to make responsible and qualified journalism in Istanbul. Turkey is getting bigger; political and economic power of the country grows but Turkish newspapers and media fall behind this momentum.