Bats, dancers and cute koala bears: All in the Daily News
Güncelleme Tarihi:
What you see in a newspaper, just as with the famous inkblot test developed in the 1920s by psychologist Hermann Rorschach, seems to depend on the eye of the beholder.
To test this I shared the inkblot you see on this page with Hürriyet Daily News section editor Marzena Romanowska. She saw a mask, "the kind you would wear to a costume ball." I turned to reporter Sevim Songün and she perceived first "two winged dancers about to jump." Then she decided to change her verdict to "two cute little koala bears." I then showed the same inkblot to page secretary Akif Dilmen: "It’s a bat," said Akif. There is, of course, no "right" answer.
And it has long been my view that the same is true for our work as journalists. People will see many different things, impute their own longings or suspicions, like us or hate us, read us or use us to wrap fish. We certainly can and do assert our own aspirations for our newspaper. But at the end of the day, it is the readers who will decide what we are, what we stand for, what we are trying to accomplish. As with Rorschach’s test, reader reactions to our new garb as the "Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review" have been as diverse as my little impromptu survey with an inkblot in our newsroom Friday.
Some readers’ views concur with our own, that expanded business coverage, expanded city coverage and our new "Horizons" page to better focus on regional international news all make sense. Others have concluded that there is a noted increase in news translated from other Doğan newspapers, something empirically not true. Others see a tilt toward the ruling party in Turkey’s parliament; others a tilt against it. One reader objected to our inclusion of a horoscope. And a half dozen or so see dark conspiracy. My favorite so far was one that sees this is part of the "basic goal" of our parent Hürriyet to control the world’s Turkish-speaking peoples. Thus our conversion, the reader writes, is "as abstruse, arcane and impersonal as anything ever concocted by servants of the Supreme Porte." While I suspect the reader meant "Sublime Porte," I accept the compliment nonetheless.
What can I say?
My own first experience with inkblots was at the age of 10. My refusal to attend school, periodic outbursts of tears and an interest in the racy novels of Ian Fleming worried my parents. I was off to the shrink, which actually became a further useful device to skip class.
In any event, many years later an intrepid girlfriend managed to illegally retrieve my "cume file." This is short for "cumulative file" the document that follows American children through their life as students, moving with them from school to school. I thought the psychiatrist’s professional assessment was pretty good: "David," the doctor wrote, "is 10 years old and he is trying too hard to become 11."
I will come back to this matter of inkblots, but first I do want to repeat how we ourselves see our mission. On our first day in our new role, here is what we wrote in an editorial:
"Turkey’s leading daily Hürriyet, which this year celebrated its 60th anniversary, came into existence as the midwife of parliamentary democracy in this country and has been defending the same ever since. With more than 600,000 readers each day, Hürriyet in recent years has established itself as Turkey’s strongest newspaper advocate for the rights of women and a crusader against domestic violence. This year, that mandate was redoubled to campaign for human rights in the broadest sense. This past summer, the Hürriyet Freedom Train, a human rights education project, carried lawyers, activists, teachers, entertainers and a team of reporters throughout the country. The rail journey covered more than 10,000 kilometers, visiting 46 towns and cities to highlight human rights abuses and teach citizens how to demand and defend their rights. As in the journalistic cultures of other Mediterranean countries, Hürriyet is a newspaper of passion that does not shrink from the vivid.
The 47-year-old Daily News, marches in a very different tradition. Its circulation is tiny in comparison to Hürriyet and it does not seek mass circulation. It is not a ’popular’ newspaper and never will be. It prizes sobriety, reserve and a certain journalistic distance from the animators of events. The Daily News is often described as an ’Anglo-Saxon’ model. Balance, fairness to all, dispassion are some of the values we prize. In a word, our style is straight. Hürriyet plays in the brass section of Turkey’s journalistic symphony; we are in charge of the oboe among the woodwinds."
I do not think I can add to that. This is the role and mission that we have set out for ourselves. But just like in a review of inkblots, only readers can judge how well we succeed or how harshly we fail.
If I can share my personal view of where we are, I think our motivations are not that different from those ascribed to a 10-year-old subjected to inkblots decades ago.
The Daily News is 47 years old. And we are working like hell to become 48.
David Judson is editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review