Hej dear people,

I would like to notify you about an issue and send an update regarding my new appointment as Coordinator and International News Editor for "dokuz8 Activist News Network. I will be curating and coordinating projects for "dokuz8 as of the January 1st 2017, mainly on issues related to citizen journalism, free expression, digital security; and conduct field trainings in all regions of Turkey. Annual focus for 2017 will be in "gender-focused as well as child-oriented reporting and journalism". I will be applying for project fundings especially in these fields, as well as rights-advocacy, labor-journalism, legal consultations/support for citizen-journalists. Although the association that officially founded the network was shut down with a decree after the State of Emergency that was declared after the coup attempt, we have adopted another NGO that was founded to conduct research and projects on journalism related issues; and currently we are looking for solutions to circumvent this issue, by adopting another association and transferring projects to the new organisation. For those of you interested, here is the news network’s twitter account (since the official news portal has been censored too) https://twitter.com/dokuz8haber You may reach the Medium account as well:https://medium.com/@dokuz8HABER (soon there will be an English section too)

This past year has been a tough one in Turkey; I have come back from Sweden and re-settled in Istanbul, however the year has been marked with explosions, attacks, deaths, house raids and a general downfall. In the first half of the year I had to cancel most of the activities I had been organising due to these events. Since the June 2015 elections, there have been a total of 18 explosions/attacks in Turkey, which left hundreds of dead and over a thousand wounded. With these, came a social reservation when fewer and fewer people wanted to participate -let alone organise- events and trainings; which made it an even harder year.

While the explosions and attacks had targeted the civil society at a great length, the cherry on top of it all was the July 15 coup after which the pressure has grown exponentially across the country, and stress levels have risen in society, economy and governance. It has become a challenge operating in civil initiatives with the arrests and imprisonment of journalists, academics, activists and even the members of parliaments.

This year, the main accomplishments have been that I started writing for Katoikos.eu, restarted Today Talks -political/social discussion meetings at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, and organised Youth Internet Governance Forum II in Istanbul as part of Turkey Europe Foundation.

As of the new year, there will be many projects and ideas emerging; and if you feel that there is something related to the fields of free expression and journalism; or if you do feel that there is anything that needs to be spread in activist media in Turkey please feel very welcome to contact/share with me.

For all those that have survived 2016, Happy New Year May 2017 bring us all better days...

Gurkan Ozturan *Coordinator & International News Editor* *"dokuz8 News Agency Network* gsm: (009)0542 741 55 63 twitter.com/Obefintlig http://twitter.com/GurkanOzturan