The meeting which was attended by journalists from Van and its districts, as well as from Şırnak, Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa, Elazığ and Bitlis, was held on August 24, 25 and 26.

In the meeting, more than 30 journalists representing diverse media outlets received  training on a variety of topics including: digital transformation of news in the digital age, rights-based journalism approach, mobile journalism, data verification, the situation of local journalists in the East and Southeast, election security, election news monitoring, detecting the violations in elections.

dokuz8NEWS executive editor Gökhan Biçiçi explained that they established the #Election2023 Local Media Coordination with the aim of providing news flow from all 973 districts of Turkey and playing a meaningful role with the accumulation of their experiences in the past elections. Stating that around 150 media organizations agreed to take part in this coordination, Biçici gave information about the steps to be taken before and during the election. Expressing that radios and televisions can produce joint broadcasts during the election period, Biçici stated that #Election2023 Local Media Coordination has a purpose to build joint news centers in the ensuing period. Gökhan Biçici drew attention to the historical significance of the upcoming election and said that journalists and citizen journalists will be a part of the efforts to ensure an accurate coverage of the election process.

‘’Turkey is preparing for a vital election. With all this experience, dokuz8news will try to ensure that the Turkey society will reach reliable news from locals, especially in upcoming elections, by leading the establishment of a local media coordination in which at least one media organization from every district of Turkey is involved in the elections.’’

Nejat Taştan, one of the founders of the Independent Election Monitoring Platform, made a very comprehensive presentation on "Election Monitoring, Violation Detection and Reporting".  Taştan's presentation gives information about the violations experienced during the election process and the problems experienced on the election day. Nejat Taştan also shared information that will assist in the production of news in the election process with local journalists, and shared his own experiences in the past elections, particularly those related to the Independent Election Monitoring Platform.

Journalist Bekir Güneş talked about the problems of the local media, accompanied by data from MEDAR's local media database research, Assoc. Dr. Erkan Saka, on the other hand, gave information about the use of social media by local journalist in his presentation titled “Social Media Tools and Social Media Tools for News”.

The training program titled “Election Journalism for Local Media and Citizen Journalists” started with Gökhan Biçici's presentation on “Digital Transformation of Post-Pandemic Media and New Media”. The training continued with Mustafa Kara's presentation on "The Concept of News in the Digital Age and the Transformation of News" and "Rights-Based Approach to News and Application Examples in Different Fields" and ended with Nurcan Seven and Ercan Yılmaz's joint presentation on "Mobile Oriented Video Journalism".After these presentations, discussions took place  with the participation of local media representatives.

ELECTION JOURNALISM MEETINGS

The meeting held in Van was the most recent round of the Election-Focused Journalism meeting series whose first round had been done in Izmir on 4-6 November 2021. 

Following this meeting, dokuz8News and Local Media Coordination conducted trainings in Hopa, Samsun and Ereğli, three different provinces of the Black Sea in the first months of 2022. Election2023 Preparatory Meeting was held in Istanbul on 29-30 July last month. Election-focused Preparatory Meetings in different regions will continue in the coming months.