I often met Orhan at a bustling coffee shop in Beşiktaş, a secularist-leftist enclave on Istanbul’s European side. He called the café his office. Our conversations were continually interrupted by his acquaintances stopping in for a coffee or passing on the street, but he seemed to thrive in the chaos. Orhan was in his late 30s when I got to know him, a decade and a half older than me and much cooler, dressed most days in a rock concert tee-shirt and ripped jeans.

Elif spent a few days covering the siege of Kobani from Suruç, where, she admitted, “I felt totally like a stranger.” She traveled to the border with a TV crew from XYZ, which had become her main employer. It was Elif’s first Syria-related story and just her second time in Turkey’s southeast.

Nur’s services were in even higher demand in 2015. Perhaps the deepest ambivalence of fixers: thriving business is correlated to calamity. Reporters are drawn to events that destroy sources’ lives. It can be hard to keep up a performance of objectivity and professionalism for clients while sharing sources’ experience of suffering.

I met Michael at his hotel in Beyoğlu on Monday morning. He asked me over coffee about Turkish politics and my research. He was filling in for the newspaper’s regular Turkey correspondent, who had mistimed her vacation. Michael had reported in Turkey on a couple previous occasions (his usual fixer was already booked) but did not have detailed knowledge of the country. He asked very general questions about contemporary politics and Fethullah Gülen, whom the government had already named as the coup attempt’s mastermind. I characterized the Gülen Movement as a wide network with a conspiratorial side but with many affiliates engaged in nothing more sinister than teaching math to children.

Elif and José continued to work together occasionally. After a couple of years of painful lessons about what stories would and would not sell, José secured a “string” with a syndicated news website, an informal agreement that they would accept his work on an ongoing basis, even though he was still paid per article as a freelancer. This arrangement allowed him to focus on one article at a time with the confidence that he would be paid, if often belatedly and only after complaints to the editor. As a stringer, José could also sometimes expense Elif’s fees instead of paying them out of pocket. She would type up a receipt for “translation services” for him to forward along to the editor.

Several of our protagonists’ careers underwent great change over the 2010s. Yet I have argued that when we zoom out, we see that continuous individual-level changes are a part of a larger stability, a dynamic equilibrium in the field of international journalism.

Part II looks at the position of fixers within the larger field of journalism. The newsmaking process can be understood as a series of mediations between successive contributors along a chain that stretches from local sources all the way to foreign audiences. “Fixers,” “translators,” “producers,” and others engage in similar journalistic activities along that chain, but news contributors nonetheless draw – and police – important distinctions among these various labels. To rise in status above “translators” and perhaps be recognized as “producers,” fixers try to present themselves as objective professionals and avoid the appearance of local allegiances. Yet local connections are, paradoxically, also their greatest asset for serving client reporters’ needs. Through accounts of reporting on events from the 2014 Soma mine disaster to the Syrian and Afghan refugee crises in Turkey, these chapters illustrate fixers’ ambiguous place in journalism’s hierarchical division and their efforts to claim high-status roles and labels.

In her first year after university graduation, working as a fixer in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır, Nur more or less followed the formula of her first fixing adventure with Alison. She would introduce visiting reporters and academics to her friends, to Kurdish Movement activists and intellectuals and cultural revivalists, to people she wanted to talk with herself. Her clients were also interested in talking to these people but considered her more of an activist than a professional fixer. She would often end up surprised and disappointed to find articles that reporters had published without showing her a draft or sending her a link, articles that went against her guidance and understanding of an issue.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on the Fethullah Gülen Movement, which had gone from Erdoğan’s key ally to his bitterest foe. The police arrested members of its own force alongside judges, prosecutors, and journalists alleged to be Gülenist conspirators.

Part V will be about change: change in the lives and strategies of our protagonists, change in Turkey and Syria and of international perceptions of those countries, change within the field of journalism, change in the way we should understand who controls the media and how.

For Habib, fixing remained a side hustle to his job as an interpreter for an NGO called Civic Aid that assisted Persian- and Pashto-speaking asylum seekers. He did not think of himself as a journalist or distinguish fixing from other projects in which he functioned as an intercultural broker, as when academics hired him as a research assistant.

When a news contributor’s social and moral link to the field of international journalism tightens, they gain greater frame control, more moral sway to change their foreign colleagues’ minds. Yet at the same time, the moral drive to challenge those foreign colleagues with frame-breaking information and the capacity to access fresh perspectives weaken as that contributor’s dispositions, social network, and field of vision align with their foreign teammates’. We might call this the Producer’s Paradox, the flip side of the Fixer’s Paradox.

In 2016, I expanded my research methods from interviewing and observing reporters and fixers to working in both roles myself.1 Becoming a freelance reporter was as simple as pitching a story idea to a news outlet and hiring one of the fixers I knew to help me. I recruited multiple fixers for each story I reported so that I could compare how a change of brokers might lead me in a different direction. This was a luxury few reporters can afford. I was lucky to have my journalism subsidized by research funds from Columbia University and the National Science Foundation, because I lost money on every story I wrote.

Late in the evening of Friday, July 15, 2016, I was at home in Etiler neighborhood idly browsing social media while my then-girlfriend-now-wife Brett rehearsed music when strange reports started to appear in my Twitter feed. Military vehicles had blocked off bridges connecting Istanbul’s European and Anatolian sides; soldiers were on the street telling people to go home, that it was not a drill. Turkish Twitter was collectively realizing that a coup d’état was underway. Soldiers appeared in Taksim Square and at Istanbul airport.

Urban warfare raged across Turkey’s southeast in early 2016 as security forces recaptured city centers from the PKK’s youth wing. As the death toll mounted, it struck me as odd that foreign news reports about the conflict were still using the same estimate for the total death toll of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict – approximately 40,000 – that had appeared a decade earlier when I first started to follow the issue. I decided to write an article about where the estimate came from and why it seemed stuck at 40,000.

Aziz’s abduction in Aleppo made the couple more guarded and suspicious about working with the foreign press. The international community’s response was a harsh reminder of their marginal status in journalism. Foreign reporters who reached out to Leyla while Aziz sat in a Jabhat al-Nusra prison cell probed whether Aziz had conspired in his clients’ kidnapping. Those clients’ governments did nothing, as far as the couple could tell, to secure Aziz’s release when they negotiated ransoms for their own citizens.

Nur worked nonstop with reporters in the southeast throughout 2015 and 2016 on the refugee crisis, the collapsing Kurdish peace process, and legal attacks on the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) that the government opportunistically redoubled after July 15th. The party had nothing to do with the coup attempt, but the government ramped up plans already under way to prosecute HDP lawmakers under anti-terrorism laws. Erdoğan used state of emergency powers to replace democratically elected HDP mayors with state-appointed “trustees,” much as his prosecutors had forced opposition media outlets into trusteeship.