When I lost my job, it never crossed my mind to abandon journalism. The real question was where and how I would continue. But this was not a predicament that caught me off guard. While still working full-time at an institution, I was already preparing myself for the possibility of becoming unemployed or having to transition to freelance work.
I had been engaged with data long before I became a journalist. When I started working as a project coordinator and editor at my previous workplace in August 2022, I directed my focus toward datasets covering the institution's areas of work. By December 2024, when I left, I had amassed a diverse collection of carefully curated datasets that were reportable: press freedom, freedom of expression, internet censorship, access restrictions—subjects I had been following for years.
After leaving that position, I continued maintaining this data systematically. Over time, I added new datasets to it: verified data breach cases from official sources, suicides at metro and Marmaray stations, stand-up comedians facing legal accusations for jokes, broadcast ban decisions, community notes added to X posts I had verified as genuinely false, AI-generated news stories.
Whenever a new development emerged related to topics I was tracking, I never viewed it as a singular incident occurring in isolation. Instead, I considered it alongside my previous records, and in doing so, a pattern of news value emerged. I would then pitch these as story ideas to publishers. One of my greatest struggles began right there.
After preparing a story, I sometimes had to spend as much time explaining why it mattered as explaining the story itself. Granted, there is nothing inherently wrong with this—a journalist pitching a story to an editor is a natural part of the work. You have thousands of records, months of tracking, a dataset showing larger trends across various topics weighted toward press and freedom of expression. You see what that data is telling you. When the story is published, readers see it too.
But the editor across from you may still evaluate the matter as merely a single current event, an explanation, or that day's trending news cycle. Most of the time I succeeded in getting the story accepted, but I spent far more time than usual explaining why the work I proposed was not merely a single development and what larger pattern the data revealed. The fact that this dynamic repeated almost every time began to both exhaust and waste my time.
From Unemployment to My Own Platform: What Do the Numbers Say?
Given this situation, I decided in June 2025 to launch my own platform.
What I did was straightforward: I created a website and opened my own space to publish stories I believed needed to be told. I took the name from the work itself: What Do the Numbers Say?
After some time, I received grant support from a civil society organization working in media. This support was valuable to me. At least it signaled that my work had economic substance and that others found the publication idea worth backing. But there was a small (!) problem: the support I received was enough to sustain me for only a few months. Consequently, I had to constantly seek new revenue sources, and one doesn't need to be an independent publisher to see how difficult that is. Moreover, as grants and support in the media sector dwindled, freelance writing opportunities narrowed proportionally. Even Turkey's largest media organizations struggled to build sustainable revenue models. The issue thus transcended independent journalists finding funding—it became a question of what economic model could sustain journalism itself. What I'm saying here remains true today.
For this reason, I began selling many of the stories I wanted to publish on What Do the Numbers Say? to platforms that pay for reprinting rights. I continue to do this and now do it more comfortably and regularly. Yet often what runs through my mind is that I should publish the story on my own platform, since I built What Do the Numbers Say? precisely for that purpose. But I face a simple economic reality: when I publish a story on my own platform, I earn no revenue. The same story published on a platform that pays reprint rights yields economic compensation for my labor.
Consequently, even stories I once prioritized highly sometimes cannot make it to my own platform. Yet I can say that I have managed to establish a certain order in my freelance journalism. In fact, I can now confidently say that I am not unemployed but a journalist who prefers freelance work. The most important reason for this is that I have built a working rhythm over the years.
Thanks to this, when a newsworthy topic resurfaces, I am several steps ahead of many journalists in terms of background knowledge. I often already have years of history on that subject matter. This gives me important room to maneuver.
I can more quickly see where today's development originates, how many times it has occurred before, during which periods it has intensified, and who it has affected. As a result, my expanding dataset over time both multiplies and facilitates my capacity to produce news. I suspect one reason I can generate more consistent income than many freelance journalists is precisely this. I think this matters because I don't want to minimize the experience of freelance work or unemployment based on my own case. I continue to produce news and earn from those stories. But I witness very different narratives around me.
Production Alone Is Not Enough
There are journalists who go months without selling a story or earning enough to reach a minimum wage. There are those forced to work other jobs to stay in journalism, those who have drifted away from fields where they specialized for years, those who eventually quit the profession entirely. The pressure this creates on a person is not hard to imagine.
Waking up with nothing to do, watching your familiar routine evaporate overnight, and seeing that damage your daily life—these are points I have witnessed in my friends' stories. What prevented me from experiencing this was my ability to keep producing, because as I said at the start, Turkey's conditions led me to prepare for such a period. I had datasets I had built over years, topics I was following, and stories I could extract from them. Most importantly, I knew there were publishers interested in my areas of focus.
This entire process made the economic dimensions of independent journalism starkly clear to me. Having a good idea, a strong story, or a data archive built over years is not enough by itself. A journalist must be able to finance the time spent researching, receive compensation for their work, and maintain conditions under which they can continue producing.
Today I still practice freelance journalism. On one hand I work for different publications; on the other I continue to grow my data archive. Perhaps the most important thing in my story is this balance.