Germany
Karakaya Talks – redefining news reporting for Germany's social media generation
Karakaya Talks aims to curate topics and news for Generation Z and Millennials of colour in Germany. According to data, 27% of the German population identifies as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour), but only about 6% of the top leadership positions in the biggest media organisations are composed of people from these communities.
Karakaya Talks was therefore born with the aim of giving visibility to these communities. Initially launched as a talk show on YouTube, being the only talk show and news format in Germany with a hijab-wearing host, Karakaya Talks is now only producing content on Instagram and TikTok. Even if they are surpassing 100 000 followers on Instagram and more than 46 000 on TikTok, they remain very dependent on the algorithms of these large platforms, which can change at any time.
Karakaya Talks received many prizes, such as the Grimme Online Award for the best format, production and presentation in 2020, and the "Der Lange Atem" prize from the Deutscher Journalisten Verband Berlin (German Journalists Association Berlin) in 2023. Memberships, sponsorships, and grants allow the media outlet to be financed.
We spoke with Esra Karakaya, founder of Karakaya Talks.
How did you come up with the idea for this project?
I was feeling like there was no journalistic content for people like me, for Millennials and Gen Zs of colour in Germany. So we decided to start as a talk show on YouTube, almost seven years ago, to give a voice to these communities. Shortly after we were approached by the public broadcasting station in Germany, and we worked together for a very short time.
Then we founded the company, and we continued doing the talk show. But we noticed after almost two years, that making money with a product that is so expensive was challenging for us. So we pivoted and developed a new strategy for news format on social media to really scale our reach.
So now you're focusing only on Instagram and TikTok?
Yes, now we don’t do the talk shows anymore. We developed news content on Instagram and TikTok. I think what's important to say is that's where we have the most amount of reach, but the time that we spend is, I think, 50% the content and 50% community building. So literally making events and really meeting people and building relationships.
On a monthly basis, we reach 800 to 900,000 people on Instagram, sometimes a million, depending on the season. And on TikTok, it’s probably around 300,000-400,000 per month.
So using these social media, it’s also a way to reach a different, younger audience, who sometimes are less informed?
Most of our audience are between 20 and 40 years old, depending on the content and platforms. TikTok is a little bit younger. But I think they follow the news very well. They just don't follow the big media companies.
We cannot think anymore that we will do one content and everyone's going to watch it. Times have changed. Younger audiences and other audiences consume news differently. The news broadcasting stations are very old school. That's what we kind of understood, and that's how we're moving. We try to look at the segments on the market and try to develop content that suits them and that they like to watch or read. What we do is create content specific to a target group.
We recently saw algorithm changes on these platforms. I imagine this has impacted your work?
We experienced algorithmic changes on both platforms. On Instagram, before the political ban, we had a 30% growth. Since then, it has gone to zero, and it took us six months to get from 99,000 to 100,000 followers. So it's definitely a shift, but it wasn't as detrimental to us because we already had established a rather big reach. It was more of a moment for us to restructure our strategy.
On TikTok, there were also algorithmic changes. I think that was around one year ago. Our videos constantly were for sure at least 50,000 views, and then they dropped. It's the moment when they kind of changed, putting content first, which I kind of like, but it also means that sometimes we have videos that have like only 300 views, which is nothing. So it really goes from 100,000 views to like 500 or just 300 views.
And how do you navigate with this? Are you sometimes thinking of creating your own platform to be less dependent on social media?
I love this question. I feel like, oftentimes, media makers quickly go to the solution of [thinking] we need our own platforms. And theoretically, yes, that would be nice. But practically the solutions that have been built are terrible. No one from our communities will ever use these platforms. They're so far away from their realities.
And for us, that's a different kind of business that we would do, like building a whole platform. That's not our job. That's not why we exist. So how we navigate that is by trying to be very observant and very quick. So whenever we see something like that, we try to evaluate.
How is that going to impact our finances? How is that going to impact our team? Is it going to impact us? These are commercial platforms, so sooner or later, we will have to build a newsletter base. We will have to build something else that gives us kind of a backup plan.
And how do you finance your activities?
We have three models that we're working with. The first one is a classic membership model, a few community members that give us a monthly fee that supports us. The second one is partnering with NGOs, or also sometimes brands. For example, the International Rescue Committee wants to do a piece on Gaza, and then we can collaborate because that's also what we cover. And the third one is event sponsoring.
With this, is it enough? Or is it sometimes challenging?
It’s always kind of difficult to see the future because things are changing. When we started in 2020, it was COVID, so there were no community events possible. But then inflation happened. So memberships kind of went down. Then events are happening right now. It’s always kind of like… classical entrepreneurship, trying to navigate the seas.
We are also working on our second edition of the BIPOC Media Fest, in June in Berlin. It's for media makers, not just journalists but also content creators and filmmakers, to really learn sustainable tools to change the media landscape. It’s like a workshop where people really learn tools.
In the last German elections, the far-right (AFD) achieved a historic result, notably with the support of Elon Musk and by attacking diversity. Does this worry you for the future?
Germany is going into dark times. It’s already kind of terrible now, and for sure the next election will be worse. The next administration will 100% follow the Trump administration. Germany loves to do what the US does. So obviously for me as a journalist, it is tough to see, but also as a company. I think generally, journalism outside of the big media companies is going to be even more vital.
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