Once a journalist, always a journalist
Welcome to my blog! My name is Sevgi Akarcesme. I was a journalist until my newspaper, Today's Zaman, was brutally taken away from increasingly oppressive government of Turkey . I had switched to a career in journalism in 2012 after quitting my secure job in bureaucracy. It was a short yet extremely intense period under heavy pressure. Since then, I have tried my best to pursue reporting often with very limited resources. I was forced to leave 'home', Istanbul, in March 2016. After the initial shock, for about a year, with a tiny group of exiled colleagues in different parts of the world we worked hard to report tragedies going on in Turkey to the outside world in the absence of free media inside the country. After a while, I had to move on to start a new life. Online reporting from home was not a sustainable route. It was almost funny to listen pro-government media claiming that people like me had more than enough resources to report in English. All I had was a tiny M...