Over the past decade, Turkey has routinely been one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, and this has produced, in conjunction with other factors such as self-censorship and corporate-clientelism between news companies and state officials, an incredibly restrictive and repressive media climate that is purposefully punitive towards journalists. Despite this, there has simultaneously been a proliferation of citizen journalism in the country. This paper traces the seemingly paradoxical rise of citizen journalism in Turkey during, arguably, Turkey’s most restrictive media climate ever. Juxtaposed against the overall decline of professional journalism in Turkey, citizen journalists do not merely fill a void left in the wake of their censored professional colleagues but have actively worked to alter the function of the news media. I argue that during the first half of the decade, especially during and in the aftermath of the Gezi Park Protests of Summer 2013, citizen journalism expanded precisely because of the broad censorship in the Turkish mainstream media but also, in part, due to emergent technologies such as Twitter. However, the state of emergency powers afforded to the government after the failed coup attempt of 2016, in conjunction with state censors becoming more adept at handling social media technologies, altered the trajectory of citizen journalism in Turkey. By focusing on Turkey’s most well-known and accomplished citizen journalist group, 140journos, this paper finds that the group, throughout its now more than eight-year tenure, strategically shifted from a “just-the-facts” configuration during and after the Gezi Park protests towards more affective, social commentary-driven content in the wake of the failed military coup. In doing so, the group abandoned the moniker of citizen journalism altogether in lieu of referring to itself as a “new media publisher” that creates original documentary series, conducts social research, and creates visual stories. This paper argues that in addition to the group positioning itself as a “new media publisher,” in essence professional visual journalism, the group’s affective turn can also be understood as a part of a lineage of social-justice journalism—or journalism that is advocacy-driven.