He was wise to suggest that if the criteria were not set at the very beginning, the end result would impose different criteria and we would declare ourselves "successful" no matter how well we had performed.
So, is Today's Zaman successful when held up to the criteria that I wrote down two years ago?
Well, my first point said this: "Ask your readership. If they find you successful, you are successful." I received an e-mail yesterday from Gülhan Altındağ, the sales manager for Today's Zaman, who paid courtesy visits to several ambassadors in Ankara last week. I'm assuming that the comments received from ambassadors were given in private conversations, so I won't give any names here. But I can see two recurring comments about my newspaper shared by the chiefs of diplomatic missions in Turkey: "The first thing I do in the morning is read Today's Zaman," and "Today's Zaman has a special place among the newspapers published in Turkey."
This is good enough. But these compliments may well be a reflection of diplomatic courtesy and not the quality of the paper. The second point I wrote down two years ago was "the swiftness of corrections we receive from our readership when we make mistakes." If your readership does not take your mistakes seriously, this means that you are not taken seriously. We have made mistakes over the past two years. But none, it seems to me, have gone unnoticed or uncorrected. I remember one particular instance when a good friend at the Iranian Embassy called in the very early hours of the morning, waking me up and warning me that at one point in a trivial news item in the inner pages of the newspaper "Iraq" had been written instead of "Iran." I was both ashamed and honored because it meant several things to me: The Iranian diplomat was reading my newspaper at such an early hour, he felt it was important for his nation that such a mistake shouldn't pass unnoticed and go uncorrected since it had been made in a serious newspaper, and he felt adequately close and friendly enough to me to wake me up. This is better than good.
The third point in my criteria was about the frequency that we were quoted by academic and popular-academic papers produced in Western countries about Turkey, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Only if we were regarded as objective and reliable by academics studying Turkey should we regard ourselves as "successful." The European Stability Initiative published a briefing in April of last year, titled "Turkey's dark side: Party closures, conspiracies and the future of democracy." Out of 69 quotations made in this briefing, 21 were from Today's Zaman and one was from Sunday's Zaman. I refer to this particular briefing because it was the first to catch my attention, proving our motto "Your way of understanding Turkey" to be a meaningful one. I don't want to give the name or the right of response to one of our British colleagues who has been stationed in İstanbul for a long time and who frequently quotes us without acknowledgement. He is quite critical of Today's Zaman and loves to label our newspaper as "Islamist," but his lines cannot escape the "taste" of Today's Zaman. Oh, this is wonderful.
The fourth point on my list was whether we were open to differences and to change, whether we were learning from our experience and whether we were ready to apologize for our mistakes. These are, or course, the universal standards of journalism. Looking back in time, I remember the articles from the Palestinian and Israeli ambassadors to Ankara being published on the same page. I remember articles from retired Ambassador Faruk Loğoğlu with their staunchly secular stance being published in Today's Zaman -- I still miss those articles, even if I didn't particularly agree with their content. I remember the pages we gave over to the four major political parties before the July 2007 elections. Political polyphony is not always a given. We had to run after politicians and work hard to convince them to write an article for Today's Zaman so that their strand of politics wouldn't be left unrepresented. To be frank, we still have a long way to go on this fourth point, but we are on the correct path.
The fifth point on my list was about the happiness of the employees of the newspaper. About that, I can only speak in the name of my colleagues in the Ankara office. I can see the faces of my diplomacy correspondent, Emine Kart; my correspondents for parliamentary and political affairs, Ali Aslan Kılıç and Ercan Yavuz; my aspirin-girl, Ayşe Karabat; and my defense correspondent and columnist, Lale Sarıibrahimoğlu, smile whenever I look at them. These smiling faces have made my two years at Today's Zaman the happiest time of my journalistic career. I thank, first and foremost, my small team in Ankara, and then all those who make Today's Zaman what it is.
The sixth criterion asks whether our readers are recommending us to our yet-to-be readers. Are you doing your homework?
