What is 140journos? Who is it, whose is it, what does 140j mean? This page is the official and comprehensive answer to these frequently asked questions: the story of 140journos — a publisher that began in January 2012 as a citizen journalism experiment on Twitter, transformed in its fifth year into a video-driven creative journalism experiment, and has since become one of Turkey’s pioneering new media publishers. Its origin, its method, its place in the academic literature, its creative team and its present day.
140journos is an independent, Istanbul-based new media publisher made up of three brands: 140journos, producing original documentaries; 140juniors, producing cartoons; and 140journey, producing AI-generated content.
EST. JANUARY 2012NEW MEDIAISTANBUL
Contents
00
What Is 140journos?
Three brands, one publisher
140journos is an independent new media publisher based in Istanbul. It produces original documentaries on political and social issues, and publishes them — in formats it defined from scratch and with its own distinctive method sets — on digital platforms, YouTube first and foremost.
Three brands live under the publisher’s roof. 140journos is the main brand where the original documentaries are produced. 140juniors is the cartoon-producing arm of the same editorial world; it treats Turkey’s agenda in the language of animation. 140journey is the newest brand, producing AI-generated content and running narrative and visualization experiments with generative tools.
We owe a small clarification about the name. “140journos” can sound confusing at first; on top of that, the shortened “140j” mark used in some of our logos can create the impression that the brand’s name is “140j”. Let us clear it up: the publisher’s name is 140journos; “140j” is merely a visual abbreviation, and “journos” is English slang for journalists. As for the “140” — that story belongs to the next chapter.
01
Where Does “140” Come From?
January 2012 · Twitter’s character limit and the idea of a news agency owned by the public
140 was the character limit that gave its format to Twitter — the platform now called X. Whatever you had to say, you had to say it cleverly, in 140 characters. 140journos takes its name from the discipline that constraint created.
The founders of 140journos launched the project in January 2012 with the idea of building a news agency owned by the public: nationwide communication networks covering the issues that mainstream media left unreported. In the media climate of the period, even major stories could take hours to reach the screens; the founders wanted to prove that news could be delivered without a TV station’s logo on the microphone. The account was opened, and the first court hearings and street events began to be reported on location, 140 characters at a time.
The experiment quickly generated its own literature. Academics first described the practice as “organized citizen journalism”; the technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci, upon hearing the 140journos story, would say that this was not citizen journalism as we know it but a kind of “journalistic citizenship” — a citizenship built through the practice of journalism. By 2013 the project had grown into a nationwide network with hundreds of contributors across Turkey, working verification processes and publishing in a strictly neutral language.
Turkey’s political and social conditions pushed 140journos toward a new format in its fifth year. But the name “140” remained, as a reference to those early days — a reminder of what a character limit teaches: saying a lot in very little space.
02
Year Five: The Format Shift
January 2017 · A video-driven creative journalism experiment
Having started with citizen journalism in January 2012, 140journos began a video-driven creative journalism experiment in its fifth year — in January 2017. With this experiment, 140journos turned into a pioneering publisher in Turkey’s new media landscape.
from the edit desk · 140journos post-production
At the center of the transformation was format. With the documentary format it defined from scratch and its own distinctive method sets, 140journos carried out countless journalism experiments for new media: documentaries in which archival research, field shooting, data visualization and music are fused into a single narrative; whose duration is set by the subject; and which are edited from start to finish like works of cinema. Storytelling narrative and creative editing changed the rules of the game.
The shift also carried a sectoral meaning. Journalism is an important field, yet one largely closed to innovation — and most of its problems stem precisely from that closedness. By carrying the talent pool and skill sets of the creative industries — filmmakers, designers, musicians, animation artists — into journalism, 140journos played a role in changing the field. A significant part of the visual language and narrative structure that comes to mind today when one says “new media documentary” in Turkey took shape inside this experiment.
03
Academic Interest and International Recognition
From TIME to Harvard: 140journos as a case study
Since its founding, 140journos has been followed not only as a publisher but as a case for researchers studying the transformation of journalism in the new media age.
TIME magazine listed the founders of 140journos among the names transforming journalism in Turkey in 2015. In the same years, speaking tours featuring talks and debates were organized with Columbia University academic and technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern and MIT. Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press, 2017), which became a foundational reference on protest and media in the network society, placed the Turkey that 140journos lived through at the center of this literature.
“buraya bakarlar” · from 140journos visual works
Joint projects and knowledge exchanges were carried out with 140journos’s contemporaries among new media publishers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Methods were presented at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School; Harvard’s Nieman Reports covered the founding story and the model in two separate features; and Columbia SIPA’s Journal of International Affairs examined the project as an example of Turkey’s changing media landscape. All of this, without doubt, opened new paths for 140journos in making sense of the Turkish drama it was itself a spectator of, and in discovering new ways through the situations it faced in the 2010s.
Academies from all over the world have studied 140journos as a case — and continue to do so. Numerous articles and theses have been written on 140journos in fields such as the formation of new media content, the building of community-centered media institutions, the emergence and development of journalism productions that use elements of drama, the spread of information in the age of algorithms, and the new media economy.
Among the most comprehensive of these is a master’s thesis written at the University of Arizona, which models the decade-long evolution of 140journos in three distinct phases: On the Ground, Curatorial and Professional/Creative. And the Peter Lang volume Journalism in Turkey: Practices, Challenges, Opportunities (2020) devoted a standalone chapter to 140journos: “From Citizen Journalism to Alternative Media: The Case of 140journos”. The full list is in the bibliography in the next chapter.
04
140journos in the Literature
Selected bibliography · books, theses, academic publications and press
The list below is a selection of publications that take 140journos as their subject or examine it as a case. All are publicly accessible; click the titles to reach them.
“5 Questions for Engin Onder”. Nieman Reports, Harvard University, 2017. (See also “A Sense of Exhilaration and Possibility”, Nieman Reports, Spring 2014.)
“Citizen Journalism in Turkey”. Political Critique — Connected Action, 2016. (On Zeynep Tufekci’s “journalistic citizenship” observation and the European Cultural Foundation–supported workshops.)
Note: the academic literature touching on 140journos is not limited to this list; a large number of articles and graduate theses in the fields of new media, citizen journalism and alternative media cite 140journos. The list is restricted to directly accessible primary sources.
05
The Creative Team and Production Services
A multidisciplinary kitchen
Today, many disciplines coexist in the 140journos creative team: producers and thinking people from journalism, political science, filmmaking, photography, music and much of the creative industries watch Turkey together, so that 140journos’s ideas can take shape.
from the field to the edit · the 140journos production line
This kitchen does not only produce its own documentaries. 140journos takes on the research, field production, post-production and editorial consultancy work of the biggest publishers in Turkey and the world. It is a Netflix supplier, with work ranging from script doctoring to productions whose shooting and post-production it has undertaken. It appears on HBO Max with two different series — nine episodes in total. It has a five-episode body of work on Exxen, and likewise on Gain.
For anyone wondering how an independent publisher stays standing — here is the answer. The method and skill set built through our own documentaries has also grown into a production-services practice in demand at international scale; and that practice finances our editorial independence.
06
Today: Approaching Year Fifteen
From the editorial desk to the field, every day
As it approaches its fifteenth year, 140journos keeps building relationships every day with its editorial team, in order to understand Turkey: across Turkey’s different cities, and — chasing the subjects that concern Turkey geographically, culturally or politically — in different countries of the world.
To date, more than 250 documentary pieces have been produced, reaching hundreds of millions of views. 140journos continues to develop original projects for its 2 million subscribers, with documentary and cartoon content every month. Every card you browse on this site is a piece of that production.
Job applications are accepted through individual portfolios only. Researcher and editor recruitment is closed until further notice. Senior professionals working in video editing and motion design may send their detailed portfolios to portfolio@140journos.com.
you can send your questions through our social media accounts or via info@140journos.com.
