Orhan, the metalci former national newspaper reporter, covered the Soma mine accident with an American news site. He was established in the fixing game by then and had developed routines for finding sources even when he lacked direct personal contacts. Instead of, like Elif, driving to the site first and hoping to meet the right victim once he arrived, Orhan monitored the Turkish media, skimming every story reported on location. He found an article mentioning an Alevi village that had lost more than a dozen men in the disaster, many of them related. Erdoğan and the governing AKP, with their increasingly sectarian Sunni Muslim identity politics, had a contentious relationship with the country’s Alevi religious minority, and Orhan knew his clients would bite at a story framed by not just sadness but also oppression.1 And with so many dead, they would find someone willing to talk.

I first heard of fixers when I participated in the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul in summer 2010, fresh out of college. Each student had to pursue their own photo stories over the course of a week, and workshop organizers provided us with a list of local fixers. Though I had taken undergraduate courses on international journalism, I had only the vaguest of ideas about what I was supposed to ask of the people on the list.

When Orhan first started fixing, he coached clients that Turkish opposition journalism was under siege, that Ergenekon and Sledgehammer coup plot trials were a sham, that Erdoğan was an authoritarian amassing power. They mostly dismissed Orhan as an embittered Kemalist. In their view, the big picture was that AK Party was democratizing Turkey, integrating the country into Europe, and performing an economic miracle.

For Elif, a police interrogation was a frightening new experience. But Nur and other Kurdish fixers in the southeast considered state security forces as a fourth party ever in the background of their interactions with reporters and sources. No mere dyad or triad but a tetrad of fraught relations complicated Nur’s moral world.

Part IV centers on the flow of information that becomes news stories. Close analyses of source–fixer–reporter interactions that informed reports on the Turkish government’s crackdown on domestic critics and on the country’s July 2016 coup attempt show, concretely, how fixers transform the information that passes through them from source to reporter. From the ways they prepare reporters for interviews to the words they choose when interpreting between Turkish and English, fixers cannot help but shape reporters’ perceptions and so the news. Fixers nonetheless operate within the tight constraints of news organizations’ framings of events and templates for coverage. Fixers’ interventions into information transmission are patterned by socially constructed but idiosyncratic moral considerations: their personal and political aspirations, as well as their desire to harmonize emergent conflicts between the parties they broker.

Conflict between the respective interests of journalists and locals is clearest when people on whom journalists want to report would rather kill or ransom them. Between 2012 and 2014, numerous journalists were targeted by militants in Syria. Some ended up in ISIS custody. Initially, there was a blackout on media coverage of these abductions, in a later-controversial consensus that reportage could compromise negotiations for release. But in 2014, ISIS released beheading videos of freelance reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff, which made headlines around the world (Simon 2014).

I hired Orhan to help me for the same story about the crackdown on the Turkish press. The newsworthy peg on which I thought I could hang the story was the recent seizure of Zaman. When I discussed my idea with Orhan at his usual café, he did not suggest any pro-Gülen media sources. He instead encouraged me to contextualize recent events with the Gülen Movement’s history of collusion with the government in targeting critical journalists.

Orhan and other secularist Turks considered the 2010s to mark a low point of political oppression.1 But for minority ethnic Kurds living in eastern Turkey, the 1990s were crushing.

The term ambivalence is only a century old. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the word at a time when social scientists were grappling with the rapid societal change of modernization. In the new metropolis, millions of people could move among disparate social worlds and take on multiple roles with far greater ease and speed than in the village (Simmel [1903] 1971; Bauman 1991: 60–63; Bernet 2006). Some feared that society’s moral order would come crashing down because people were faced with a splintering of culture and morality as they moved from work to home to recreational life. They could no longer abide by a simple, unified moral world. Taking on a multitude of roles and being exposed to a multitude of different expectations could – social scientists, theologians, and cultural commentators worried – free people to do whatever they wanted with no unified moral code to regulate their actions, or render people ambivalent to the point of moral paralysis or psychological breakdown.

Elif happily adopted the label of fixer, at least in the early days. The title did not entirely make sense (what was broken and how did she fix it?) but sounded cool and signaled that her project of becoming intimately familiar with the Other Turkey was succeeding, that she was not an insulated bourgeois but a gritty on-the-ground woman of action. After her initial, thrilling induction into the craft during the Gezi protests, though, her duties as a fixer quickly became less adventurous and more mundane.

Not all topics are politically contentious; not all cultural and linguistic barriers to communication are obstructively high; not all time maps are out of sync. Fixers’ jobs are easiest when reporters and sources already agree about what information to exchange and how, when, and why to exchange it. Matchmaking compatible reporter–source pairings is an important part of fixers’ jobs as catalysts, and fixers learn to expand their social networks to maximize pairing options. But perfect matchmaking is not always possible. Conflicts between journalists and locals arise, and fixers are caught in the middle. Expectations pull on them from both sides. The fact that additional parties – police, militants, spies, nosy neighbors – also surveil and pressure fixers adds to the complexity of their moral worlds.

Any act of communication is both a social interaction and a means of transmitting information (Wadensjö 1998). Thus far, I have focused on communication as interaction: a means to signal identity, claim status, win or defuse conflicts. Yet communication among reporters, fixers, and sources also transmits the information that becomes news. We will now turn to the informatics of fixing with a close look at what is lost, gained, and transformed in translation from events in the world to stories in the media.

The focus of my story, under Orhan’s sway, was shifting to how journalists within Turkey viewed the crackdown on Gülen Movement media differently than their international counterparts. Barış’s indictment of Zaman contrasted dramatically with the empathetic coverage of the newspaper’s plight in the United States and Europe, where Zaman’s seizure had yielded headlines like “The Death Blow to Turkish Media” and “This Is the End of Journalism in Turkey” (Arjomand 2016b).

Syrians were not the only ones fleeing to or through Turkey in the 2010s. There were Iraqis, Iranians, Somalis, Congolese. The second largest national group, after Syrians, were Afghans (UNHCR 2018).1

Kids do not tell their parents that they want to be fixers when they grow up, nor do their parents pressure them into the occupation. Students do not study in school to be fixers or attend career fairs with fixer kiosks. Many accounts of becoming a fixer involve serendipitous encounters or friendships unexpectedly evolving into careers.