“Would press freedom in Turkey be impacted negatively when the country’s largest media group is sold from a company that reluctantly supports the government to a company that eagerly supports the government?” read the headline of Zaytung, Turkey’s satirical news site, on March 22. It was the day that the Dogan Holding announced talks for the sale of Dogan media, which owns the top-selling daily Hurriyet and broadcaster CNN-Turk, to Demiroren Holding. "Unconfirmed rumors indicate that the government plans to unite all Turkish newspapers, TV channels and news websites under its e-state portal," noted the article, referring to the government's online service portal where Turkish citizens can access official documents, check their tax debts or research their genealogy.

“This headline is precisely why I'd rather follow the news from Zaytung than from any other paper,” Tugba, a post-graduate student of media studies at a public university in Izmir, told Al-Monitor. “I saw this headline in Zaytung barely hours after the first media bulletins on the sale, while other newspapers were probably pondering on the angle they'd use. Zaytung says what other papers dare not say, but in a funny, catchy way.”

The online satirical paper has 5.4 million followers on Twitter and more than 600,000 on Facebook. It has created copycats and parodies. “Sounds like Zaytung” has become a common expression used by politicians, columnists and laymen to refer to absurd news and calls have been made to the Turkish Language Institution's online dictionary to include the word. Still, for a Turkish audience accustomed to fake or biased news, Zaytung is "more honest" than most other outlets.

“When I go out and talk to young people, they say that they follow Turkey’s agenda from Zaytung,” said Hakan Bilginer, an electronics engineer who founded the site in 2009, modeling it after The Onion, an American satirical news site. The name is the Turkish pronunciation of “Zeitung,” German for newspaper. The portal's symbol is the crow and its slogan is “honest, objective and unethical news,” a reference to the website’s lack of affiliation to any other media group and its recognition of no sacred cows exempt from satire.