By Wolfgang Sannwald
More and more people are taking notice of tünews INTERNATIONAL. This has been confirmed by the doubled number of clicks on our articles. We have been collecting click figures since March 15th, 2020, when we switched from printed wall newspapers and magazines to digital e-news in the middle of the first Corona lockdown. In 2020, we published 609 news stories online; in 2021, we published 391 by the end of November.
We consistently research and write our own news. We do not publish opinion pieces, but factual and fact-based reports. Our news is published in four languages: German, English, Arabic and Dari/Persian. In 2020, our statistics program registered 2.618 million clicks, in 2021 the figure was 3.427 million. On average, this means that each article received around 4300 clicks in 2020 and around 8750 in 2021. Since June 2021 in particular, almost every published article has received more than 10,000 clicks. That is a significant increase. Our articles often have national significance, but we also publish many articles for the district of Tübingen with the cities of Tübingen, Rottenburg and Mössingen. One example of this is our Corona information on local test stations and vaccination sites. In this way, we directly address the approximately 3000 people who have fled to Germany since 2015 and live in the district of Tübingen.
In terms of content, readers continue to value current and in-depth reports on the Corona pandemic. The news variants in Arabic and Dari/Persian on this important topic are particularly popular. Presumably, many migrants prefer information on this important topic in their language of origin. A second mainstay is our news with high relevance for the everyday life of refugees. These range from topics relevant to the target group, such as certificates, deportation stops or information on naturalization, to more general topics such as food moths or oak processionary moths, to the colors of doctors’ prescriptions. Readers also value topics relating to children and everyday school life.
In 2021, longer articles gained increasing interest. We prefer topics that contribute to or deal with the integration discourse. Cultural exchange, for example, does that. At tünews INTERNATIONAL, articles on the archaeology of the Near East made up the majority, with many reaching more than 50,000 clicks, and some up to 75,000. Larger, colorful articles focused on the change of perspective between former refugees and people who have lived here for a longer time. Revealing alienating views of German habits when buying food here and in Afghanistan or in the Arabic-speaking world.
Overall, tünews INTERNATIONAL continues to reach its target groups well. The language variants German, English, Arabic and Dari/Persian each accounted for about a quarter of the click figures on average. Individual articles, however, show clear deviations. An article about German unity was particularly well received by people from the Arabic-speaking world. The colors of doctors’ prescriptions interested mainly German-speaking readers.
Our articles are not only broadcasted to the world via our website www.tunewsinternational.com. Since the launch of tünews INTERNATIONAL, Radio Wüste Welle has been airing a selection of them in its Newcomer News. Mini-jobbers run our four language channels on Facebook, of which the German one has 98, the English one 225, the Arabic one 517 and the Daris-language one 773 subscribers at the end of November 2021. This channel is obviously even more successful in reaching migrant target groups. Since the beginning of November 2021, we have also been offering our tünews INTERNATIONAL content via the Integreat app. These currently subscribe to eight municipalities, including in Bavaria, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, as well as cities such as Augsburg, Dortmund and Kaiserslautern.
At the end of 2021, the tünews INTERNATIONAL team will include around 20 migrants in mini-jobs and three experienced journalists as well as working students from KulturGUT e.V. An employee in
the district office coordinates the deployment of the mini-jobbers and the work processes. The district of Tübingen has made the non-profit media operation possible since 2015 through annual subsidies, personnel and material contributions.
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Redaktionsmitglieder von tünews INTERNATIONAL bei der Arbeit. Foto: tünews INTERNATIONAL / Tobias Sick.
