The Voice of the Uyghur Post
A Uyghur-language news site is aiming to connect a scattered diaspora and preserve a culture at risk of disappearing.
A lot keeps Tahir Imin up at night. There are the memories of his time imprisoned in Xinjiang, the daughter he was forced to leave behind there, and the ex-wife he divorced in an effort to protect her from retaliation over his activism in the United States. Last he knew, his mother and two brothers were imprisoned in the region, swept up in the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Uyghur ethnic group. “They have already done everything to my family,” Imin, who is forty-five, said of the Chinese government. “I don’t even know if they’re alive.” Imin’s freedom and survival haunt him. “The only thing to do to comfort my guilty conscience is speak for my people,” he said.
Last November, Imin debuted the Uyghur Post, one of the world’s only Uyghur-language news sites. The outlet publishes daily stories on topics ranging from Uyghur culture in Kazakhstan to an Australian court case on Uyghur forced labor to Turkish Airlines launching a new flight route to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. Its monthly audience measures around thirty thousand readers. In February, the site launched a weekly podcast.
Related Knowledge Center: Inside the newsroom
As newsrooms struggle with rickety business models and precarious finances — as well as new technologies — they are deploying an array of editorial responses.
The Times and its critics | Washington Post mortem