The Black Sea: How Investigative Journalism Endures in Turkey

The Black Sea reporters during their investigation into the illegal construction of bungalows in Sapanca, Turkey. Image: Courtesy of The Black Sea The Black Sea: How Investigative Journalism Endures in Turkey The documents were explosive: offshore companies, a US$25 million oil tanker, and a paper trail leading to the family of Turkey’s most powerful politician: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When Turkish investigative outlet The Black Sea published the findings based on these documents in 2017, Turkey was still reeling from the failed coup attempt of the previous year. Tens of thousands of people had been arrested or dismissed. Hundreds of journalists faced trials, jail sentences, and smear campaigns, while much of the mainstream media had already shifted into the hands of pro-government business groups. In the first two years following the coup attempt, six news agencies, 41 radio stations, 38 TV channels, 70 newspapers, 20 magazines, and 29 printing and distribution companies were shut down by presidential decree. In this environment, the little-known outlet published an investigation that reopened an old political wound. Years earlier, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had brushed off questions about his son’s purchase of a ship with a word that became infamous in Turkey: “gemicik,” or “a little ship.” Erdoğan said “the little ship” had been bought cheaply through favorable credit terms. The Black Sea director Craig Shaw’s 2017 reporting revealed that the vessel, Agdash, was not simply a cheaply financed “little ship.” The investigation traced how Azerbaijani-Turkish businessman Mübariz Mansimov commissioned the tanker, Erdoğan-linked offshore companies later acquired it, and Mansimov then leased the ship back while paying off the loan used to finance the purchase. The story quickly moved from a small website to the parliament halls. Opposition lawmakers waved printed copies of The Black Sea’s reporting before government MPs tore the pages apart. “It was quite a nervous time,” recalled Black Sea board member Zeynep Şentek. “For the first time, there was an investigation that showed undeniable evidence of corruption involving the president’s family,” Şentek said. “We made sure the story would be published at the same time with all the partners so that there was protection for us, and that there would be no way for them to get rid of the story either,” she added. The only Turkish outlet to republish the investigation in full was the newspaper Evrensel. Its then editor-in-chief, Fatih Polat, was later sued by President Erdoğan’s lawyer over the publication. Publishing the investigation carried obvious legal risks. But Polat said refusing to publish a thoroughly documented investigation out of fear would have amounted to a betrayal, he felt, of a longer investigative tradition associated with reporters such as Uğur Mumcu and Metin Göktepe. Both were killed because of their work. Polat asked Shaw to share the reporting documents behind the investigation. “It was a very solid one,” he recalled. “There were no gaps in it.” Erdoğan’s office has not made any response to requests for comment or made an official statement in response to the reporting. For Polat, the impact of The Black Sea’s reporting forced editors and journalists inside Turkey to confront their own red lines. “Shaw did very good journalism,” Polat said. “For us it also became an invitation to responsibility. We could not continue our lives as if no such investigation had been published.” Republishing the investigation in full, he argued, became a way of refusing self-censorship at a moment when fear was reshaping much of Turkey’s media landscape. Persistence as a Newsroom Model The Black Sea did not begin as a Turkey-focused outlet. Founded by the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, it initially operated as a platform for longform reporting from across the Black Sea region. Over time, Turkey gradually became central to its investigations. Their distributed network of up to a dozen or so contributors — depending on the size and focus of an investigation — collaborates cross-border and with international newsrooms. Shaw had previously worked on Offshore Leaks, one of the first major cross-border investigations built around leaked offshore financial data. At the time, he said, Turkey was largely absent from international investigative collaborations. Through cross-border projects including Football Leaks and Malta Files, Shaw and Şentek gradually expanded The Black Sea’s Turkey reporting. By 2021, the outlet had effectively evolved into a Turkey-focused investigative organization run by the two of them. In June of this year, The Black Sea was officially welcomed as a member of GIJN. This shift had happened gradually. As Turkey’s media landscape narrowed, The Black Sea remained small, cross-border, and difficult to categorize: not an exile media, not quite a traditional newsroom, but a collaborative investigative space focused on documenting abuses of power. “We still want to be here in 10 years, still holding the powerful accountable no matter who runs the government,” Şentek said. The outlet also operates differently from most Turkish media organizations. “If we don’t have a story, we don’t write,” Shaw said. That approach has made growth uneven but also helped define The Black Sea’s identity. “We are a very resilient organization,” Şentek said. “Sometimes we have a larger team, and sometimes we’re down to the bare bones, but we still make it work. The fact that we survived this long is our superpower.” Like many investigative outlets, The Black Sea relies largely on grants from journalism and philanthropic organizations. But international interest in funding Turkey-focused journalism has declined in recent years. “In Europe, they see Turkey as a lost cause,” Şentek said. “That’s one reason there is less and less funding for journalism projects about Turkey.” The problem extends beyond funding. As mainstream investigative reporting inside Turkey has weakened, younger journalists have fewer opportunities to learn investigative methods or work on long-term projects, Şentek said. “The hopelessness is so pervasive. Journalism is becoming something that takes place on Twitter.” The Leak Years The investigations that first put The Black Sea in the spotlight emerged through large international leak collaborations. Football Leaks, from 2016, became the outlet’s first major international collaboration. The project involved dozens of journalists analyzing millions of leaked football industry documents, transfer agreements, contracts, and offshore records. For Şentek, it was also a crash course in cross-border investigative reporting. “It was really exciting,” she said. “I really learned how to work with leaks.” Rather than framing the stories primarily as sports reporting, The Black Sea approached them as corruption investigations. “We expected hostility because people in Turkey are very passionate about their teams,” Shaw said. “But we were surprised by the positive feedback we got.” Fans themselves, he said, already suspected that agents and intermediaries were draining money from their clubs. The larger breakthrough, however, came through Malta Files. In addition to the Erdoğa tanker story, The Black Sea’s Malta Files reporting exposed offshore wealth connected to some of Turkey’s most powerful political and business figures. One investigation found that a former prime minister’s family had undeclared assets worth about €140 million (US$155 million), including at least 11 cargo ships registered through foreign companies and seven real estate properties in the Netherlands. Another examined offshore tax structures linked to Çalık Holding, whose former CEO later became Erdoğan’s son-in-law and energy minister. The reporting also showed that five tankers linked to the Erdoğan family’s BMZ Group were quietly acquired by Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR through Malta-based companies. These investigations generated enormous attention online, especially on Twitter, which at the time still served as a central space for political debate and investigative reporting. But exposure did not always translate into accountability. “There wasn’t really any tangible impact,” Shaw said of Football Leaks. Malta Files, too, produced less immediate institutional response than the team expected. Over time, however, Shaw and Şentek began thinking about impact differently. “This is a record,” Şentek said. “All the stories we did eventually come back at some point,” Shaw added. “People still write to us asking about stories we did 10 years ago.” From Leaks to Satellite Imagery In recent years, The Black Sea has moved beyond document leaks to produce visual, data-driven, and geospatial investigations. One of the clearest examples was Green to Grey, The Black Sea’s contribution to the 2025 cross-border investigation that later won a Sigma Award. Coordinated by Arena for Journalism in Europe, the project used AI-assisted analysis and satellite imagery to examine nature loss across the continent. The project grew out of reporting by Norway’s public broadcaster NRK, which developed methods for detecting environmental destruction through large-scale satellite analysis. When the data was expanded across Europe, Shaw said, it quickly became clear that “habitat loss in Turkey was huge.” The Black Sea focused on the Turkish side of the investigation, combining satellite verification with field reporting, photography, and drone footage. One report documented how forests around Sapanca, east of Istanbul, were rapidly replaced by illegal bungalow developments catering to tourism demand. The satellite images gave the transformation a visual force: green patches of forest and farmland breaking into clusters of roads, roofs, and construction sites. “We all intuitively knew that it was terrible, but we didn’t have a reference point,” Şentek said. The project showed that Turkey ranked first among 30 European countries in total nature loss. “You know there is construction everywhere, but you don’t know the scale of it. Our reporting and data work managed to quantify these things.” Why They Keep Going Shaw says he has learned not to measure the impact of their work only by arrests, resignations, or policy change. “After 12 years of doing Turkey investigations, I learned that you have to find your self-worth somewhere else,” he said. “Doing this work under authoritarian conditions is the impact,” Sentek added. “The fact that this work can still happen is what matters.” Former Evrensel editor-in-chief Polat believes the impact of The Black Sea extends beyond individual investigations. “The Black Sea helped expand the arteries of investigative journalism,” he said. “It was refreshing and inspiring for reporters working inside Turkey as well.” The Black Sea increasingly sees its investigations as part of a public record that may outlast the political moment in which the stories are published. “We want to produce well-structured, well-designed, well-written stories,” Şentek said. She argued that despite the current political climate, Turkey still retains a democratic and investigative journalism tradition worth protecting. “We do have a democratic tradition where an old-school investigative soul makes the powerful accountable,” she argued. “It can come back. And it can come back stronger.” Serdar Vardar is an investigative journalist with a political science degree from the University of Buenos Aires. After living more than a decade in South America he moved to Germany to cover Turkey and global environmental stories for Deutsche Welle. Vardar was part of ICIJ’s global Pandora Papers and Shadow Diplomats investigations.