ARMENIAN JOURNAL: SITE PROVIDES CONSTANT UPDATES OF AIRLINER CRASH
By Timothy Spence, Knight International Press Fellow
International Journalist’s Network
May 11 2006
Region :Eastern Europe-Central Eurasia
Country :Armenia
Within hours of when an Armenian airliner plunged into the Black Sea
on May 3, killing all 113 people on board, the staff of the ArmeniaNow
online newspaper were providing readers with hourly updates on the
country’s first major air accident in decades.
It is the first time in its four-year history that the news
organization provided such intensive coverage of a breaking news event,
said editor John Hughes.
“I always wondered how our staff would react to a disaster like this,
but in my mind it was always going to be an earthquake,” said Hughes,
co-founder of ArmeniaNow and a veteran American newspaper reporter.
“Given what we all have to work with, what I saw was as good as
anything I’ve seen.”
The day’s news gripped the Caucasus nation of 3.2 million people.
Cafes and restaurants kept televisions tuned to local and international
news reports of the accident. Nearly all the 105 passengers and eight
crew members on board Armavia Flight 967 were Armenian.
“Armenia is a small country and I’m sure most people had relatives
or friends or friends of friends on that plane,” said ArmeniaNow
reporter Suren Musaelyan. “It’s a huge tragedy and everybody feels
sympathy to the victims and wants to know what happened.”
Most of the public and independent television stations interrupted
their regular programming throughout the day to provide live coverage
and updates of the crash of the Airbus 320, which went down in stormy
weather after trying to make a landing at Sochi, Russia.
The last major crash of a plane that originated in the Armenian
capital of Yerevan was in 1976.
Musaelyan said he last saw such energy in the news media when he
covered the 1999 assassination of Armenian Prime Minister Vazgen
Sargsyan and five other members of Parliament. He worked at the time
as a reporter for the independent Noyan Tapan news agency.
Hughes mobilized eight reporters, a photographer and three translators,
who provided hourly updates throughout the day and evening.
Veteran Armenian reporter Aris Ghazinyan flew to the crash site off
the Russian coast and phoned in reports from there. Three ArmeniaNow
staff members filed reports from Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport.
At the ArmeniaNow office in central Yerevan, three reporters worked
the phones while the newspaper’s three translators provided real-time
updates in English and Armenian.
Gayane Abrahamyan, who normally covers the arts for ArmeniaNow, said
being assigned to cover the scene at the airport was emotionally trying
but an important experience in how to deal with covering tragedies.
She said families of the victims, overcome with grief, did not want
to answer reporters’ questions. “I tried to approach people from a
different point, by trying to understand and sympathize with their
personal emotions,” Abrahamyan said, and found that people were
willing to talk freely with her.
But that was a challenge for the 22-year-old reporter. “It was
impossible not to cry. It was even difficult to talk. But I tried to
gather all my strength and just to talk to them.”
ArmeniaNow also produced special coverage for the regular weekly
update of the Web site, interviewing family members of those who
perished in the crash and covering announcements from the airline
and Armenian and Russian airline safety officials.
ArmeniaNow is published every Friday in Armenian and English, serving
the nation’s large Diaspora community in the United States, Europe and
Australia, as well as people in the country. The online publication
claims a weekly readership of 12,000 “unique visits.”
Figures for visits on May 3 were not immediately available.
It routinely updates breaking stories during the week and provided
updated results of the 2003 presidential election. But Hughes said
the air crash coverage was something new to his 20-person staff.
“It’s the first time there’s been an event like this that merited
that kind of coverage,” he said. “The reason what we did was pretty
much my instinctual reaction.”
Hughes said he first heard about the crash from a friend who phoned
from the airport around 9 a.m., about five hours after the crash
occurred. Within 90 minutes, ArmeniaNow published its first detailed
news bulletin from reporters.
ArmeniaNow is independently financed and is a partner of the Knight
International Press Fellowships in Washington. Along with Knight,
it is sponsoring an internship program for journalism students at
Yerevan State University. It also participates in a Yerevan State
training program sponsored by the International Center for Journalists.
Timothy Spence is a Knight Fellow working with journalists
in Armenia. This is his second tour with the program; he
was previously in Ethiopia. The John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation sponsors the fellowships, administered by the
International Center for Journalists. For more information, visit