This week JNews.am regional reporter talked to journalist Levon Barseghyan, the chairman of Gyumri Journalists’ Club “Asparez”, quite well-informed on the issues and obstacles faced by the regional media. Levon is one among those activists who have been struggling against the state bodies to prevent the airtime stoppage of Gyumri GALA TV for several months.
Question: Mr. Barseghayn, which are the peculiarities of the regional media and what is the difference between the national and the regional media?
Answer: 18 TV companies located in 18 regional cities have no local rivals. The newspapers published in about 30 regional cities are out of competition too. There are small markets, modest industrial capacities, relatively small staffs and lack of competition. Often the advertising markets of the local media are so badly developed, that they are not able to provide stable improvement for the local media.
Q: What development stage is the regional media at? Is it able to satisfy the information demands of the society?
This week JNews.am regional reporter talked to journalist Levon Barseghyan, the chairman of Gyumri Journalists’ Club “Asparez”, quite well-informed on the issues and obstacles faced by the regional media. Levon is one among those activists who have been struggling against the state bodies to prevent the airtime stoppage of Gyumri GALA TV for several months.
Question: Mr. Barseghayn, which are the peculiarities of the regional media and what is the difference between the national and the regional media?
Answer: 18 TV companies located in 18 regional cities have no local rivals. The newspapers published in about 30 regional cities are out of competition too. There are small markets, modest industrial capacities, relatively small staffs and lack of competition. Often the advertising markets of the local media are so badly developed, that they are not able to provide stable improvement for the local media.
Q: What development stage is the regional media at? Is it able to satisfy the information demands of the society?
A: I think local media, on the whole, can’t satisfy the information demands of the society, it is not able to provide the consumers with multilateral, free and balanced information. The situation is tighter regarding analytical information. There are no dailies published in the regions; mainly weeklies, biweeklies and monthlies are issued, most of them working according to the old and worn-out standards often supported by the local power or by some local businessmen.
Q: Which difficulties and obstacles are characteristic to the regional media?
A: Often the state authorities are criticized more easily than the local ones (mayor, municipality or the council) by some of the regional media organizations.
Q: Could the regional media prevent the pressures and restrictions?
A: First of all the regional media organizations don’t want to risk and face pressures and restrictions. Here their main “assistant” is self-censorship. They know very well which topics are not encouraged by the local power to be published, thus simply no articles covering such topics appear.
Q: Are there any privileges regional media is entitled to, which are they?
A: The primary privilege possessed by the regional media is unfortunately misused. The privilege is their being regional citizens. The local media organizations, their staffs and journalists know the district, people of their community, their problems, local and regional authorities, their behavior and activities, as well as good and bad features best of all. I suppose that the local market and issues bothering the local society are the fundamental resources of the regional media, of course, events of state designation are important too, but regional problems shouldn’t be disregarded.
Q: Which are the fields still closed for the regional media activity and why?
A: There is little or no coverage on local corruption, as the regional corruptionists master a lot of methods to punish the local media (territorial issues, advertisement blocks, tax pressures if necessary, even National Security Service (NSS) appearance, etc). In one region “the director” is an NSS official, in the second one – the regional governor, in the third one – the mayor and so on, and all of them are interrelated. Nothing more could be expected under corruption that has occupied the country. So some of the media organizations have to shelter under this or that “roof”; one “cooperates” with a parliamentarian, the second – with a mayor, the third – with a regional governor, the next with an oligarch, etc. “Let us survive to see what we are still to endure”, here is the credo followed by 8-9 media organizations out of the 10. The situation is almost the same for Yerevan broadcasters; the “roof” surface is different.
Q: How has the regional media been effected by the developments in the field of media during recent years?
A: Regional broadcasters have learnt bitter lessons from deprivation of airtime of A1Plus and Noyan Tapan TV channels and from the “authoritarian regime” battle of GALA TV and have turned to local mass entertaining, promoting and advertising means. Most of them have drifted away from the media mission; they have reduced the broadcasted news programs or have no such at all, or organize such programs randomly in the case of a funded project. There are, of course, exceptions. The regional print media shows signs of life from election to election; weaker organizations dream of an annual government funding, stronger ones, especially in Shirak, Lori and Syunik regions do their best to independently enlarge their consumer market paying more and more attention to advertisement market.