Cover photo: Kobane, northern Syria, January 18, 2025: To protect people in the bazaar from potential Turkish drone attacks, the main street and several adjoining streets have been covered, leaving only a faint trickle of daylight. ©Maryam Ashrafi
As the year 2025 came to an end, we want to use this occasion, first of all, to thank our readers, writers, and supporters for your continuing support throughout the turbulent year. With your backing, we were able to expand our works in 2025 into the magazine’s first reporting missions at the hot spots of global turmoil.
In the beginning of the year, we sent three of our editors to Syria in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall, anticipating that the post-civil war developments in the country will have wider repercussions for the Middle East and beyond. In October, one of our editors embarked the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza to pierce the media and humanitarian siege of the Palestinian enclave, together with other media and health care professionals.
“Despite the apparent threats against the Flotilla, we decided to board because we feel morally obliged to report from Gaza and to show solidarity with our colleagues. We, as independent reporters, have a duty to shed light where governments want to keep the dark,” we wrote at the time.
As we look back to these experiences, we start the new year with an acute awareness that the world around us is changing radically and fast. Only the first weeks of the new year have felt like decades happened. The focus of the global war shifted to Venezuela, where US military forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro to install a new regime, friendlier toward the exploitation of the country’s immense natural resources. The prospects of intra-NATO conflict are higher than ever, as the US threatens Greenland with occupation. In Iran, countrywide protests have, once again, threatened the continuity of the dictatorial rule. Syria is falling into a new civil war, as the transitional government of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham advances into the Autonomous Area of North-East Syria, crushing down on the Rojava Revolution and stirring renewed fears of genocide among the Kurds. Smelling weakness, warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic seek options for a new military adventure in the Middle East.
Yet, behind the apparent chaos of the past months, we see patterns and interconnections: powerful financial interests and imperial ambitions, rising national and ethnic chauvinism, and corrupt alliances of state power, patriarchy and capital. Sometimes they appear in broad daylight, and other times require months of research to understand and expose. Whatever it takes, the challenge and duty of journalism is to make these patterns visible and understandable.
In 2025, the community around Turning Point roughly doubled in size and grew to 4,000 monthly readers seeking to navigate the world in turmoil. We interpret this as a sign of confidence for our vision: to amplify marginalized voices, empower alternative views, tell untold stories, and inform rather than bombard with information. In 2026, we want to build on this ground and improve.
We have started the new year by extensively evaluating the latest developments and our work in the previous year. It has become evident that we have to operate simultaneously slower and faster, with stronger focus on the core issues and greater openness to sudden changes, with strict discipline and flexibility. We have paused publishing in January to reorganize ourselves to better address the global environment we face this year. In the coming months, we will implement the necessary changes that will enable the magazine to be more flexible in adapting to new circumstances without losing focus on core topics and long-term projects.
In short, we want to find new ways to challenge the dominant perspectives without losing the core mission of solid in-depth reporting on questions that slip out of the fast news trends. And we want to do it together.
If you have a story, we are always open for submissions and encourage pitching us on a low threshold. If you have an idea for collaboration, contact us. If you believe in the magazine, consider setting a monthly donation through the donation widget at our website. And if you have feedback or thoughts on what we could do better, you can always drop us an email.
