About this paper
What this is, how stories are chosen, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
What this is
God Morgon is a morning briefing from Istanbul, written every morning. It is free, carries no advertising, and asks nothing of you: no account, no subscription, no email address.
It is written for someone who needs to know what happened before the day starts, not to cheer anyone up. Concerning news stays in. Significance comes before mood.
What we cover
Turkish politics, foreign policy and the economy. Europe: the EU, security, enlargement and the national votes that move the union. The world, when something changes how states stand towards each other. Sweden, briefly, for a reader following the country from abroad.
No gossip, no sport, no celebrity. If the day is thin, the paper is short. Four stories beat eight padded out.
How we verify
The rules this paper holds itself to, every day:
- Primary sources first. If TÜİK, a central bank, Eurostat, Statistics Sweden, a government or a court published the figure or the text, we read and cite that document, not an article about it.
- Two independent sources for anything contested. Two outlets running the same agency copy count as one source.
- Social media is for discovery only. A post is a lead to pull on, never a source for a fact.
- State news agencies are named as such when the claim is a political one.
- Every figure names the body that produced it and the period it covers.
- Every story links to its original outlet. You are not asked to trust the paper, you are asked to click through and check it.
The topic pages
One story at a time rarely says what is actually going on. The topic pages hold a thread over time: what the thing is, what is at stake, what is contested and by whom, and what is still unresolved. Each page also gathers everything the paper has published on that thread.
Named voices are quoted verbatim and linked to where they said it. A quote is never paraphrased inside quotation marks: if the exact words cannot be found, the quote is left out and the position is described instead.
Languages
The paper is written in Swedish and English. The Swedish sits at godmorgonistanbul.com, the English at /en/. Neither is a machine translation of the other, both are written as prose.
How this paper is made
The research and the writing are done by an AI system (Claude) which runs once every morning against the sources above. The model used is printed at the foot of every edition. We would rather say that plainly than have you work it out.
That is exactly why the rules above matter more here than they would elsewhere.
Corrections
If later reporting contradicts something we ran, we say so in that day's edition rather than quietly deleting it.