Resurfacing authorship problems
This week we chose to do a review of our present newspaper in comparison to almost a year ago. While examining the week of May 25-31, 2015, and allocating news articles into categories such as global, regional and local, I could not help but notice several hiccups along the way. While for any other problem I would dedicate an entire article to the subject, as both İbrahim Altay as well as myself mentioned before in Reader's Corner, I will instead give them a quick mention.
First one of the recurring problems is the issue with authorship. From a journalistic perspective, providing authorship to news articles serves more than just giving credit where it is due. Authorship can boost a newspaper's credibility and provides readers with necessary information about the source. Signatures also promote the newspaper's uniqueness if we see the majority of them belonging to the newspaper's staff, namely editors, reporters or columnists. Since photographs are part of the content, the same goes for them and they should be signed in order to give readers the full picture. When we reviewed the six issues of this week's newspaper there were six articles published without being assigned authorship. There were two on Monday, May 25; two on Tuesday, May 26; two on Wednesday, May 27; four on Thursday, May 28 and four on Friday, May 29.
The articles without a given author from the Monday, May 25 issue were "Information Valley to be launched tomorrow" from the Business page and "AK Party's Kurdish candidate warns about PKK election threats" from the Politics page.
In the Tuesday, May 26 issue we see "Oil wells occupied by ISIS" from the Business page had no given author as well as the "Antalya hosts Archery World Cup 2015" titled Sports page article. On Wednesday problem persisted in the Business and Sports pages. Titles of the articles were "TPAO receives four oil exploration licenses" and "PSG to loan Xavi from Al-Sadd next season" respectively. On Thursday, May 28, the number rises and the "Erdoğan remembers executed ex-PM on anniversary of 1960 coup" article in the Politics page, "Illegal Syrian migrants nabbed in Antalya" from National page, "Economic confidence index up 1.5 PCT in May" from Business page and lastly "Beşiktaş to hire Şenol Güneş" from the Sports section have no authors as well.
Lastly, from the Friday, May 29 issue we saw four articles without authors, one from the International page, one from the National page and two from Sports. On the International page the "Rising Islamophobia concerns US Muslim organizations" article was missing an author as well as the "Finance Minister's daughter in intensive care" from the National page. As for the Sports page, "Putin accuses US of meddling into FIFA affairs" and "Beşiktaş set to sign Serbian defender" had the same problem.
While the number of cases is quite low, if we are to aspire for quality and aim to gain credibility, these must be eliminated completely. So I urge our editors to pay more attention to this problem.
As for the problem with missing photo captions, it seems that while their numbers are lessened, we need more time to allow suggestions from Altay to take root. We will revisit this matter in the upcoming weeks. The same goes for photo credits as well.
Lastly, we have a correction to make. In the article, "The taste of tradition," which was published on May 8, the writer referred to Gülnur Tumbat as "… the first and only female Turkish mountaineer who has climbed Mount Everest, Gülnur Tumbat." However, this information is false as the first female Turkish mountaineer to climbed Mount Everest was Eylem Elif Maviş. She managed the extraordinary feat back on May 15, 2006. The matter came to my attention as Tumbat, the person mentioned in the article, reached us in order to inform us about the mistake and to provide us with the correct information. After checking, we made the changes to our web article and changed the sentence to "… the first and only female Turkish mountaineer who will be climbing all the highest peaks on all the geographic continents in the world, Gülnur Tumbat." I thank her for notifying and allowing us to correct the mistake.
First one of the recurring problems is the issue with authorship. From a journalistic perspective, providing authorship to news articles serves more than just giving credit where it is due. Authorship can boost a newspaper's credibility and provides readers with necessary information about the source. Signatures also promote the newspaper's uniqueness if we see the majority of them belonging to the newspaper's staff, namely editors, reporters or columnists. Since photographs are part of the content, the same goes for them and they should be signed in order to give readers the full picture. When we reviewed the six issues of this week's newspaper there were six articles published without being assigned authorship. There were two on Monday, May 25; two on Tuesday, May 26; two on Wednesday, May 27; four on Thursday, May 28 and four on Friday, May 29.
The articles without a given author from the Monday, May 25 issue were "Information Valley to be launched tomorrow" from the Business page and "AK Party's Kurdish candidate warns about PKK election threats" from the Politics page.
In the Tuesday, May 26 issue we see "Oil wells occupied by ISIS" from the Business page had no given author as well as the "Antalya hosts Archery World Cup 2015" titled Sports page article. On Wednesday problem persisted in the Business and Sports pages. Titles of the articles were "TPAO receives four oil exploration licenses" and "PSG to loan Xavi from Al-Sadd next season" respectively. On Thursday, May 28, the number rises and the "Erdoğan remembers executed ex-PM on anniversary of 1960 coup" article in the Politics page, "Illegal Syrian migrants nabbed in Antalya" from National page, "Economic confidence index up 1.5 PCT in May" from Business page and lastly "Beşiktaş to hire Şenol Güneş" from the Sports section have no authors as well.
Lastly, from the Friday, May 29 issue we saw four articles without authors, one from the International page, one from the National page and two from Sports. On the International page the "Rising Islamophobia concerns US Muslim organizations" article was missing an author as well as the "Finance Minister's daughter in intensive care" from the National page. As for the Sports page, "Putin accuses US of meddling into FIFA affairs" and "Beşiktaş set to sign Serbian defender" had the same problem.
While the number of cases is quite low, if we are to aspire for quality and aim to gain credibility, these must be eliminated completely. So I urge our editors to pay more attention to this problem.
As for the problem with missing photo captions, it seems that while their numbers are lessened, we need more time to allow suggestions from Altay to take root. We will revisit this matter in the upcoming weeks. The same goes for photo credits as well.
Lastly, we have a correction to make. In the article, "The taste of tradition," which was published on May 8, the writer referred to Gülnur Tumbat as "… the first and only female Turkish mountaineer who has climbed Mount Everest, Gülnur Tumbat." However, this information is false as the first female Turkish mountaineer to climbed Mount Everest was Eylem Elif Maviş. She managed the extraordinary feat back on May 15, 2006. The matter came to my attention as Tumbat, the person mentioned in the article, reached us in order to inform us about the mistake and to provide us with the correct information. After checking, we made the changes to our web article and changed the sentence to "… the first and only female Turkish mountaineer who will be climbing all the highest peaks on all the geographic continents in the world, Gülnur Tumbat." I thank her for notifying and allowing us to correct the mistake.
Last Update: May 31, 2015 22:05