Interview Date: March 03, 2024
Table of Content
CREATOR INTERVIEW
Journalism is not an easy profession in Turkey, given the corruption of the mainstream media landscape.
For the same reason, finding credible and unbiased news sources is a challenge for the audience.
To address both needs, Turkey recap created by independent journalists in 2019 as a free weekly English newsletter. Over time, they expanded to a Turkish version and evolved into a non-profit media association dedicated to elevating journalistic efforts.
Today, I’m delighted to welcome Diego Cupolo, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Turkey recap. Diego is a successful multimedia journalist based in Turkey since 2015. His articles have appeared in prestigious publications such as The Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Policy and Politico.
Our conversation covers:
- Why they choose to start a newsletter
- The evolving role of newsletters for journalists
- Strategies for differentiating their content, including pans
- The evolution of their social media strategy
- Insights into their mixed income stream, including paid subscriptions, Etsy merch and donations.
Let’s dive in!
NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD
TOOL STACK
- ESP → Substack
- Writing → Google Docs
- Planning & Task management → Trello
- Merchandise sale → Etsy
- Team communication → Whatsapp
- Design → Adobe, Canva, Flourish
- Video → Adobe
- Growth → Substack & Patreon
- Community → Slack
- Readers’ donation → Substack, Patreon & Etsy
MEET THE CREATOR
Welcome Diego. Can you briefly introduce yourself / the team behind Turkey recap?
Hi, I’m Diego Cupolo, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Turkey recap. I founded the newsletter in 2019 with journalist Raziye Akkoç, who is now an AFP correspondent in Brussels.
Turkey Recap started as a simple news curation newsletter, and has since grown to producing original reports in the English and Turkish languages, and we’ll soon launch a podcast, as well.
“Over the last four years, our niche news platform has evolved from a completely free experiment to a non-profit media association with a partial paywall so we can cover office rent and pay freelance contributors.”
Our current core staff includes Gonca Tokyol, editor-at-large, Ingrid Woudwijk, president of our non-profit association and managing editor, Verda Uyar, our digital growth manager, and myself. We are all journalists and the newsletter at its core is a news service for people trying to keep up with Turkey news, which can often be chaotic, overwhelming and confusing.
Personally, I’ve worked as a journalist since 2002, as a foreign correspondent since 2010, and have been based in Turkey since 2015. I did odd jobs, like marketing and teaching, but always to facilitate my journalism career, and those experiences greatly inform what I do now for the newsletter.
START
To better grasp the motivation behind creating Turkey recap, we first need to understand the evolution of the news media landscape in Turkey.
Could you please take us through your origin story and elaborate on why you chose (or needed) newsletter journalism within the current context?
Shortly after Turkey invaded Syria in Oct. 2019, my colleague Raziye and I were walking through central Ankara. We were both full-time journalists, Raziye for AFP and myself for Al-Monitor at the time, but our jobs didn’t allow us to cover recent events in ways that were, let’s say, fulfilling or complete.
Raziye suggested making a podcast as a side project. I said it’d be great to co-publish in audio and on YouTube to maximize our reach. But we were two text journalists without mics and audio training. So, I proposed a newsletter, saying if it goes well, we’ll expand to a podcast and YouTube later on.
We also decided to take a light approach, with plenty of puns to make Turkey news easier to digest. This was key to our early success because we had just gone through two years of a state of emergency following a violent failed 2016 coup. Thinking back on those days only brings images of dark times, constant ID checks and genuine fear.
We did not joke publicly often, the air was too serious, but I went to an event where the speaker was being ironic about our draconian times, and I realized humor was the perfect counterweight to Turkey’s creeping authoritarianism. Maybe what we do is best defined as satire mixed with traditional on-the-ground reporting and analysis.
Our first newsletter went out to 250 subscribers and it’s been growing ever since. I think it helped that we were well established in the Turkey journalism/knowledge community, so we enjoyed organic growth through our existing networks.
But I always tie our success to our core function: tracking Turkey news. It takes a lot of time and effort to scan RSS feeds, Google news, social media or whatever, which we as journalists do anyway.
Turkey recap structured this practice for me and addressed a simple problem for many people following Turkey, like answering the question: what happened this week?
The recap was also balanced and consistent, two things often missing from local news coverage. Once we built trust and got popular enough, we spun off a Turkish-language version with a small grant, and then eventually, we started doing original reporting in both languages.
What observations do you have regarding the utilization of newsletters by journalists and the evolving role of newsletters as a content creation medium worldwide?
“Newsletters feel like one of the last safe havens for independent journalists.”
In my lifetime, the economic model for journalism has been turned upside down with the rise of social media and the internet, which I believe legacy publications are only now starting to adapt to … now as in 30 years too late.
When I started my first newspaper job, our internet content was independent of our print content. The logic was to require payment for the print content. This was the case in many places and never made sense to me.
Then, in the 2010s, most news content became free online. This also did not make sense since ad rates did not sustain the model.
Eventually, more news outlets introduced paywalls, but by that point, the sector had been changed beyond recognition, or as one colleague put it to me: “Twice the work for half the pay”.
The problem now in the English news world (EU news outlets, especially Germany, have different models) is that there are few jobs, even fewer secure jobs and the people taking those jobs are over-credentialed, often with Columbia Journalism school degrees, which serve as expensive reservations to a restaurant called low-wage journalism.
The best way to be a journalist now is not to need money or to own property and live off rent income because pay rates have not increased in at least 15 years.
That doesn’t mean journalism is not needed.
I argue journalism is too important to leave to such a narrow group of people. When the rule of law fails, journalism tends to be the sole check on power in a growing list of countries.
“In that context, newsletters allow journalists to keep building their own audiences and foster a direct relationship with a community that cares about their work.
This creates a feedback cycle that improves the quality of the work, I would say.
It also puts the journalist first instead of the media company benefiting from their work.”
As newsletter journalists, we are not cogs in the press machine but red-eyed reporters with coffee-stained laptops, sending you our unfiltered work, and I think readers appreciate the sense of rawness to it. Even if there are typos sometimes, no one tells us what to write and we only work to serve our readers.
If done right, a journalist could make an equal or higher income to work for a media company. It’s also more secure as a job since all your subscribers can’t cut your position at once.
But it’s hard work, and many struggle with burnout, but if the mission is right, the pay is decent and the work is satisfying, a journalist can’t really ask for much better.
VISION
What is your dream for Turkey recap?
To sustain a space for high-quality journalism that treats journalists right and delivers what readers need.
The economics of journalism and foreign correspondence, in English-language news especially, have changed dramatically. There are many disincentives to starting a journalism career now, and if we can create a space to keep telling stories that we feel are important, even if temporary, that’s a success in my book.
Someone has to pass the torch to the next generation of journalists and keep the fire alive in the meantime.
GROWTH
Who is your core audience? Accordingly, why did you start with an English-language newsletter?
For our English-language coverage, our core audience is Turkey watchers of all kinds. Half are inside Turkey and half are outside Turkey, with the biggest foreign audiences in the US, UK and Germany, in descending order.
That audience is a mix of diplomats, policymakers, economists, academics, other journalists and also Turkey fans or members of the Turkey diaspora.
For our Turkish-language coverage, 60 percent of readers are in Turkey and the rest are spread out, with concentrations in the same three countries as above.
How did you grow to 7,000 subscribers?
One quality newsletter at a time.
We were consistent with our publication schedule and got some high-profile endorsements at the start, which really helped build trust in readers.
“Apart from organic growth and social media marketing (pre-Musk era), we also benefited a lot from puns.
Our readership was boosted multiple times by great headlines, which were viral in themselves.”
Like I said, Turkey news is often dark, so I think people who have to consume it really appreciate our fresh take on the eternally bad news from the country.
Also, I should note our periodic table (on our Twitter banner) was shared widely across social media. People enjoyed the subversive jokes in it, and the same goes for the newsletter.
If I had to pin it down, I would say a lot of trends worked in our favor, so we were lucky as well as hard-working, and you usually need both to grow an audience.
You’re actively using social media. Can you elaborate on your strategy?
Musk likes to boast that Tesla never advertised, but he promoted it all the time for free on Twitter. He benefited directly from the free hype-machine and put a subscription rate on it when he took over because he knew the value of social media virality in marketing.
So, pre-Musk, we grew almost exclusively from Twitter, which was central to Turkish news since there are few credible media outlets in the country and Turkey news watchers congregated there to track national events and discussions.
We used silly gifs and silly puns to gain traction in the crowd, and while some people hate puns, everyone could see and appreciate what we were doing, which I should note, was fearless in a very repressive media environment.
That strategy worked until Musk wrecked it. Now, we are transitioning like everyone else. Instagram seems to create new subscribers if done right, but Threads is terrible.
“We are in a post-social media traffic world now, and I think the key is to work across mediums as opposed to platforms at this point.
For this reason, we are now fulfilling our origin-story goal and expanding with a new podcast in the run-up to the March 31 elections. We are working to deliver more YouTube content, as well, whether live broadcast or feature news videos.”
It seems we are shifting back to pre-social media traffic acquisition norms, which means we have to focus on brand building. That said, we will now experiment with a free podcast and/or YouTube channel to drive paid subscriptions to our newsletter. The prospects are there, just have to get the mix right.
MONETIZATION
Your primary source of revenue is paid subscriptions. How did you decide it was the right time to start a paid subscription?
We were completely free for the first six months, then in about May 2020, we started asking for voluntary donations. This funded some of our initial social media marketing and grew slightly over time but remained low since we did not have a paywall. We mostly worked with grants through those years and stayed free of charge to benefit readers in an information-poor media landscape.
Before Turkey’s May 2023 elections, we launched a merch store on Etsy, and no joke, our entire election coverage was funded by mugs and stickers. Again, we thought it was more important to deliver trustworthy news on the election cycle than to make a sustainable economic model.
But! After the elections, we decided to pursue formal status as a non-profit. In August 2023, we founded the Collective Media Association. Under Turkish law, all associations must rent office space.
And so, with the new expenses, we raised a paywall and it has worked fairly well to date, though I should underline our main reason for becoming an association was to be eligible for more grants, which we continue to benefit from and pursue.
The paywall covers office rent and staff salaries while the grants cover the reporting and travel expenses. It’s a mixed income stream and we continue to develop it. If you have ideas, do reach out, we are looking for collaborators on all fronts.
How did you revise your content strategy with the launch of a paid subscription?
When we raised the paywall, we made only the top of the weekly recap free to all readers. To see the rest now requires a subscription.
Also, we have 1-2 weekly paid reports, which really drive new subscriptions.
This is only for English content, though. Our Turkish language content remains free, considering the country is six years into an economic crisis and salaries are low. So, we basically leverage our English language readers to fund our journalism for local audiences.
What are your key strategies to increase the number of paid subscribers?
Quality is number one. It’s so hard to get clear information on Turkish politics and I think our reporting there is singular in the English-language since big international outlets overlook many local stories.
Balance is also central, as many readers want credible news or some representation of reality that they can trust (which is hard when most government officials don’t talk to journalists).
“So quality, balanced-reporting and trust drive paid subscriptions. No gimmicks or tricks, we focus on creating a top-tier product and the rest comes after.”
E-MAIL SERVICE PROVIDER
Why did you choose Substack? Pros and cons?
Lots of cons and a few pros. We moved to Substack after Musk bought Twitter and our previous platform, Revue, which we joined specifically to benefit from embedded tweets, since Twitter was so essential to Turkey news monitoring and discussions.
The problem though was that embedded tweets were heavy on code and caused that dreaded clipping in Gmail, so we never really benefited from Revue’s core advantage. Musk eventually shut down Revue and we jumped ship in 2022.
Since then, we’ve been Substacking for their marketed network effects, but the platform is just too basic. Novices tools, few reader stats, no anchor links allowed till after publishing, which makes no sense, and those miserable stat charts with pull-down menus designed to kill your curiosity. Substack obviously keeps useful data for itself.
Pros are that it’s free and has a network of ready-made user base, but I’m not sure how many of them convert to paying subscribers. We generally get paid subs on our own and are increasingly looking at new platforms, like Ghost. Probably the only reason we stay on Substack now is that we have our freelance contributors signed up with profiles there, but that’s not a real reason.
I should say before Revue, Turkey recap kicked off on Mailchimp.
Mailchimp had the best stats and functions with light code that prevented clipping, but our initial free subscription became too expensive as our audience scaled up faster than we could scale up the revenue model. I am still dreaming of Mailchimp stats.
NEWSLETTER EXPERIENCE
How did building Turkey recap contribute to your life professionally and personally?
Immeasurably.
More work opportunities, more networking invitations and also clout.
After we set up the newsletter and kept delivering quality-content, we were no longer viewed as journalists, but as experts on the subject matter, which is unfair because we are still doing the same job, just in a different package and without fear of failure.
LEARNINGS
If you had a chance to start over, what would you do differently while building Turkey recap?
Honestly, I’m wondering how to start anything news or politics-related without the pre-Musk social media traffic. We’d have to use an entirely different marketing strategy, and possibly talk to people, sometimes in public. The horror.
“So, I’d probably make a podcast with a YouTube channel first and reverse-engineer it into a newsletter if it gains traction. Or the opposite of what we did.”
FINAL WORDS
Experiment. Fear of failure stops too many of us from trying out new ideas.
“The approach that works best for me is to start something without commitment, and if it shows promising results, tweak it gradually.”
