“BIK compliant news software” is one of the most used and least explained phrases in the market. It is not possible for software to win you the right to publish official announcements, because some of the conditions for that right concern personnel and continuity rather than software. On the other hand a genuinely significant part of the conditions is technical, and a properly built system closes those on your behalf. This guide separates the two: what software can solve and what it cannot.
What does “BIK compliant” mean?
The Press Advertisement Agency (Basın İlan Kurumu) is the institution that regulates in which publications official announcements and advertisements are published. Whether a publication can carry official announcements depends on meeting the conditions determined under Law No. 195 and the Regulation on Official Announcements and Advertisements. Those conditions vary with the type of publication and where it is published.
The honest meaning of the phrase “BIK compliant software” is therefore this: the software helps you meet the technical leg of the conditions. The right itself arises through application to the Agency, examination and placement in a category. The software prepares the inputs of that process; it does not produce its result.
Think of the conditions in three sets
Dividing the official announcement conditions into three sets from the software’s point of view makes clear what belongs to whom.
| Set | Example conditions | Who solves it |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel | Minimum editorial roster, seniority, contracts and social security records | The publication — software cannot solve it |
| Continuity | Regular publication, uninterrupted accessibility, not interrupting publication | The publication and the software together |
| Technical | Masthead, content archive, traffic measurement, announcement publication and archive | The software solves it |
The first set is entirely your responsibility. The second is mixed: regular publication is an editorial decision, but keeping the site up is a matter of infrastructure. The third is directly the software’s job, and in a good system none of it is tracked by hand.
What software cannot solve: the roster
This is where the most frequent disappointment occurs. A publication that is to carry official announcements is required to employ editorial staff in the number and with the qualifications determined for its category. Those people must genuinely be working, their contracts must exist and the social security records must show it.
No software can meet that condition. The only thing it can do is let you see your position in advance. The requirements are set out in the minimum editorial roster guide and, category by category, in the newspaper staffing guide and the online news site staffing guide.
There is a second detail on the staffing side: employing a journalist is subject to Law No. 5953, whose provisions on severance, notice, overtime and leave differ from those of Law No. 4857. Setting the contract up correctly at the outset is cheaper than correcting it later; the clauses are covered in the journalist employment contract template.
What software does solve: the technical items
The masthead
For online news sites the masthead requires, under Article 4(3) of Law No. 5187, six items of information to be kept under a “contact” heading and directly reachable by users from the home page: the business address, the trade name, the email address, a contact telephone number, the electronic notification address, and the name and address of the hosting provider.
That is among the first items looked at on inspection, and when it is kept as free text on a page nobody notices when one item is deleted. Keeping the masthead as structured fields means the system can show you what is missing. See the masthead template.
The content archive
Article 10 of Law No. 5187 requires content published on an online news site to be retained for two years with its accuracy and integrity assured. The critical words there are “with its accuracy and integrity assured”: keeping the content somewhere is not enough, you must be able to show it was not altered afterwards.
On the software side that means every published version being stored separately, and a news item removed from the site remaining in the archive.
Uninterrupted accessibility
A site outage is not only a technical problem; in terms of the continuity condition it can become a regulatory one. Hosting is therefore not an ordinary cost item for a publication holding the official announcement right. A site that falls over under breaking-news traffic produces an outage record at exactly the most visible moment.
Traffic and content measurement
Some categories require thresholds for news counts and visitor traffic. Those must be measurable and reportable; rather than estimating at the end of the month you should be able to look at the record the system keeps. Visitor statistics and a content counter should therefore be a permanently open part of the panel.
For official announcements, note that measurement is done with the Agency’s own tool: see how traffic is measured.
Announcement publication and archive
For a publication carrying official announcements the announcement is itself content: the day it was published, its position and the delivery of copies must be recorded. Keeping published announcements in a searchable archive is both a service to readers and a help on inspection.
Four frequently confused subjects on the announcement side
- Is this an official announcement, a private announcement or advertising? The distinction is set out in the classification guide.
- How much does it cost? The column-centimetre calculation and the commission deduction are covered in the pricing guide and the commission guide.
- How is the surface area calculated? The commonest error in print is failing to convert centimetres to metres; see the newspaper surface area guide.
- Has the quota carried over? Set-off and carryover are covered in the carryover guide.
What is asked for on inspection?
To be prepared, ask this question: if an examination came tomorrow, which record could you produce and how quickly? In practice what is asked for is:
- A view showing the masthead is complete and accessible
- The archive record of content published on particular dates
- Copies of published announcements and delivery receipts
- The staff list, contracts and social security records
- Records showing the publication appeared regularly
- Records showing the site was accessible
The first three are outputs produced by the software; the last three are the publication’s own records. For a system to count as “BIK compliant”, it is expected to produce the first three at the press of a button. The full list is in the inspection documents guide.
How KEYDAL meets these items
The counterparts of these headings are directly visible in the panel. Corporate → Masthead keeps the masthead as a structured record with its own page rather than free text embedded in a theme. Corporate → Audit is the audit log showing who did what and when. Analytics → Statistics covers visitor and content measurement, while SEO → 404 Monitor and Redirects surface the broken addresses that damage the site’s accessibility.
On the archive side published content is retained; with the revision history module enabled a version is kept on every edit and the earlier state can be restored. The full setup documentation is open at keydal.wiki; you can read it before buying.
Even so, let us repeat the same sentence: these are technical items. If you do not meet the staffing condition, no panel screen will put you on the official announcement list. Software makes it easier to prove compliance once you have it.
Summary
BIK compliance is not a software feature but an organisational state. The software’s role is to keep the technical leg of that state flawless and to be able to produce the evidence: a complete masthead, a two-year archive with its integrity preserved, uninterrupted access, measurable traffic and a regular announcement record. Staffing, seniority and continuity are the publication’s own work.
The right order is: first measure which category you fall into and what its conditions are, then plan the staffing side, and only last verify on a demo that the software meets the technical items. For all the obligations with their bases see the legal compliance checklist, and for the whole software selection framework the news software guide.