By Utku Çakirözer
Reporter, Milliyet
Ankara, Turkey
Hosted by the Los Angeles Times

As my Alfred Friendly – Daniel Pearl Fellowship term comes to an end, what do I see when I look back to the last five and a half months?

I have mixed feelings. Beginning with the sad side of this experience; I think it was one of the worst times of my life when both of the two closest people in my ‘United States adventure’ have lost their jobs as part of the big lay-off at the Los Angeles Times. During these turbulent days at the Times, I observed how tough the transformation that the print media sector is passings through.

As the new generations tend to go online and do not read print newspapers, the subscriptions and circulations are shrinking which has an immediate negative effect on advertisements--the business side of the story. Most of the media companies compensate for financial losses by downsizing their newspapers. At the same time, without exception all of them give importance and strengthen their web facilities which started to generate profits.

So, one of the most important lessons I learned and I am determined to share with my colleagues in my country is that we have to find alternative platforms and ways, in addition to the traditional print newspaper, to present the news to readers. This can be done on the web through our online pages or through reaching to different social networks like Facebook, myspace, dig, etc. Or this can be realized through mobile telephones.

At the Los Angeles Times I had the opportunity to see and practice how they try to manage this challenge. They use audio, video and graphics to enrich their stories online. At the training sessions in my country, I will explain to my superiors and colleagues this trend in US media with some examples from several online news sites.

A good example would be one of my latest stories about a Turkish-American businessman who is marketing Turkish coffee and related products to the world through internet from his house in Corona, California. In addition to the story, we decided to support it with a video piece on ‘How to make Turkish coffee’. See it here http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-coffee18-2008aug18,0,2763880.story. I think this sort of examples that I will bring to the training seminars will be very educative and eye-opening for my peers.

Also in the Times, I have seen a big effort to improve their storytelling by using different visual materials like charts, graphics, Q&As, summaries, timelines, checklists, etc., to keep the readers’ attraction alive. This will be another idea to share with my colleagues back in Ankara.

A third issue that I found important, but spent relatively less time on, was about promoting or marketing of the stories on the web. I observed, with great enthusiasm, the competition between the newspapers’ online teams to attract traffic on the web. They are in a constant race to become the first source in the web. The key as far as I observed is posting them as early as possible and later updating them.

Also the newspapers are spending alot of energy on developing techniques or strategies that would result in higher traffic to their web sites. For example they develop different headlines than the print copy in order to catch the attention of search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Or they develop stories specifically for the online edition that would attract the readers and make them ‘stick’ to the web site. Sometimes I even witnessed that some of these online stories are used in the print copy next day, which is called ‘reverse publishing’.

I find all these new concepts and skills very valuable for the future of our profession. So I intend to share them with my colleagues at the training seminars.

The last idea I would bring to my home newspaper is the principle of looking for the ‘human angle’ in all possible reporting. This was something I was ambitious to learn and practice when I started my Fellowship program. After spending some weeks and writing a lengthy story at the business section of the Times, I can easily understand why this method is very popular in American papers. And I really find it healthy and useful for the future of media-society relationship in my country too. In Turkey we do write a lot of stories about issues that relate to daily lives of people on education, health, food. But I realized here during my experience that telling them from a human angle is something that builds a strong bond between the audience and the story. So, I think this will constitute not only an important part of my training seminars but also an indispensable principle of my future career as a journalist.