About Fortuna TV

Fortuna TV

Fortuna TV is a regional television company based in Vanadzor, the capital of Lori province in northern Armenia and the country's third largest city, broadcasting in Armenian. Since 2011 it has been available across the whole of Lori marz, and it holds the Lori seat in Armenia's digital broadcasting system: in the licensing competitions of 2010, Fortuna LLC won the right to broadcast as the region's channel of general profile, a decision that left Vanadzor's other regional stations outside the digital multiplex and made Fortuna one of the most consequential, and most debated, regional broadcasters in the country.

Fortuna's profile in the sources is inseparable from that debate. Investigative and media-freedom reporting records that the channel was owned by Karen Karapetyan, a member of parliament for the then ruling Republican Party of Armenia, and that its director was Karen Arshakyan. Election monitoring by the Yerevan Press Club examined its news coverage programme by programme. Taken together, those sources document both what Fortuna broadcast and why its licence award became a standard example in arguments about political influence over Armenia's digital transition.

Vanadzor and the Lori Television Market

Until 2016, Vanadzor was home to four regional television channels, an unusually rich local market for a provincial city and a reflection of Lori's size and industrial history. Lori TV, broadcasting since 1995, was among the best documented of them, employing 24 people including six journalists. The 2010 amendments to Armenia's Law on Television and Radio determined that each marz would have a single private television company in the digital network. When analogue transmission was cut off in November 2016, three of Vanadzor's companies were deprived of their licence to be on air, and the permit belonged to Fortuna. Understanding Fortuna therefore requires understanding that it did not merely compete in the Lori market; it was selected, through a state licensing process, to be the market's sole survivor in terrestrial digital broadcasting.

The 2010 Licence Award

The ARKA news agency's report of 22 October 2010 on the digital broadcasting tender lists the regional applicants as Tavush, Fortuna and Geghama Mediaholding for the three regional competitions then in view, and the Yerevan Press Club's record of the winners announced in December 2010 confirms competition number 17, for regional channels of general profile, was won by Fortuna LLC for Lori region. The neighbouring regional winners were Tavush TV LLC for Tavush and Geghama Media Holding LLC for Gegharkunik. Unlike the contested competitions in Shirak, Kotayk and Yerevan, the Lori award is not recorded as a head-to-head contest between named rival applicants in the same procedure, yet its effect was sweeping because other Lori stations already on air, including Lori TV, MIG TV and Ankyun+3, were outside the new digital licensing settlement and faced closure once analogue broadcasting ended. In November 2013 those Lori outlets were among six regional companies that wrote an open letter to the President, the Speaker of Parliament and the Prime Minister protesting that the cessation of analogue transmission had made their work useless and deprived them of advertisers; they received no response.

Ownership and Management

Reporting by Chai Khana, in a detailed investigation of Armenia's digital switch-off, states that Fortuna TV was owned by Karen Karapetyan, an MP for the ruling Republican Party, and that since 2011 Fortuna has been available across the marz. The same report names Karen Arshakyan as Fortuna's director and records that he did not respond to the journalists' queries, declining to comment on the licence issue on the grounds that seven years had passed since it was granted. Lori TV's editor Narine Avetisyan maintained in that reporting that there was a political motive in the allocation, and opposition parliamentarian Edmon Marukyan, himself from Lori, raised concerns that the licence-granting process was not fair and was subject to political connections. These claims and counter-positions are part of Fortuna's documented public record: the channel's ownership by a ruling-party parliamentarian is stated as fact by the reporting, while the allegation that the award was politically motivated remains the stated view of its critics, and no response from the channel's management to those specific charges is recorded in the sources consulted.

Programming and Schedule Character

Chai Khana's account describes Fortuna's output since 2011 as a mix of programmes produced in-house and Armenian soap operas and talk shows created by national broadcasters. That combination, local production anchored by news, filled out with acquired national entertainment, is the standard economic model of the surviving Armenian regional channels, whose small advertising markets cannot support a full day of original production. The Yerevan Press Club's monitoring identifies Fortuna's news programme by name: Planet, the bulletin through which the channel covered election campaigns, with an associated programme strand titled Annex (in the monitoring report's translation, a supplement within or alongside Planet) in which territorial-list candidates appeared as guests. The monitoring record therefore confirms that news and current affairs produced in Vanadzor formed a regular, identifiable part of Fortuna's schedule, not merely a nominal commitment made in its licence application.

Election Coverage Under Monitoring

The Yerevan Press Club's monitoring of regional broadcast media during the snap parliamentary elections of December 2018 gives the fullest independent picture of Fortuna's journalism. In contrast to Tsayg in Shirak, which the monitors found concentrated on talk formats, Fortuna paid much attention to covering the election campaign in news format through Planet: campaign events of political forces and individual candidates were widely covered, and material from other media was also used. The monitors nevertheless concluded that the principles of balance and equal opportunity were not respected. The political forces were covered mainly in a positive context, and most attention went to the ruling force of the day, the My Step bloc, whose coverage volume surpassed, and in frequency amounted to almost half of, the aggregate indicators of all its competitors combined. The territorial candidate Aram Khachatryan, deputy head of the Lori regional administration, was covered almost daily, with references to him recorded in eight pieces of the Planet programme. In Annex, the majority of guests represented My Step, followed by territorial candidates of Bright Armenia and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The monitors also noted a structural ambiguity in Armenian legislation illustrated by Fortuna's practice: Annex segments went on air marked as pre-election promotion, implying payment by the parties, yet formed part of editorial programming hosted by the company's own employees. After the 2018 Velvet Revolution had changed the government in Yerevan, in other words, the monitored pattern at Fortuna was of a regional channel giving the new ruling bloc the dominant share of attention, evidence that regional channels' alignment tended to follow whoever held power.

The Digital Transition in Lori

Fortuna's position was created by the same process that ended its competitors. The state multiplex began operating in 2015 and carries the licensed regional stations; analogue broadcasting continued for unlicensed stations under extensions until the switch-off of 26 October 2016. Media Landscapes' Armenia report records that after the transition one channel remained in each region, that the others were offered merger, a solution realised only in Gegharkunik, and that fourteen channels outside the multiplex repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked to be allowed temporary digital broadcasting. In Lori the human side of that settlement is documented through Lori TV's campaign to survive, supported by the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, the Yerevan Press Club and the Media Initiatives Center, and through the detail that cable operators Ucom and Rostelecom removed Lori TV from their Vanadzor packages despite a prior agreement, closing even the cable route. None of that reporting criticises Fortuna's own programmes; it criticises the one-channel model that Fortuna happened to win. The distinction matters for an accurate profile: Fortuna is the beneficiary and the surviving institution of a contested policy, and its own editorial record, as monitored, is a separate question on which the evidence is set out above.

Audience and Recognition

Fortuna appears in national audience research as one of the named regional stations: in the Caucasus Barometer 2024 survey question on which television station respondents trust most for news on politics and current events, Fortuna TV is among the answer options, grouped in the published results with other smaller stations under Other. That listing confirms the channel's continued operation and national recognisability into the mid-2020s, though it provides no separate trust percentage for Fortuna. No audited audience figures for the channel are published in the sources consulted, and this profile does not estimate any.

Limits of the Available Record

The record on Fortuna is uneven, and its limits should be stated openly. The sources do not document the year of the company's foundation, its earliest analogue history before the 2010 competition, its staff numbers, or a full programme schedule, and its management declined to comment when approached by investigative reporters. What is firmly documented is the core institutional story: a Vanadzor-based, Armenian-language regional channel; winner of the Lori digital licence in 2010 as Fortuna LLC; on air across the marz since 2011; owned, according to detailed reporting, by Republican Party MP Karen Karapetyan and directed by Karen Arshakyan; producing the Planet news programme; and monitored in 2018 as giving dominant, mainly positive coverage to the ruling bloc. Claims beyond that documented core are not asserted here.

Significance

Fortuna TV's significance in Armenian media is twofold. For viewers in Lori, it is the province's own television service, the only terrestrial digital channel making programmes in and about Vanadzor and the surrounding region. For everyone studying Armenian broadcasting, it is one of the clearest cases through which the costs and mechanics of the digital transition can be examined: a single licence, a politically connected owner, displaced competitors who campaigned for years against the settlement, and a monitored editorial record that showed deference to the governing force of the day. A directory profile that omitted either half of that picture would misrepresent the channel.