About Asparez

Asparez

Asparez is a regional daily newspaper and news website based in Gyumri, in the Shirak region of north-western Armenia. It is published by the Asparez Journalists' Club, a Gyumri-based non-governmental organisation of working journalists, and its website is asparez.am. In a country where almost all nationally visible newspapers are produced in the capital, Yerevan, Asparez holds a distinctive position: Media Landscapes, the country profile series of the European Journalism Training Association, describes it as the only daily newspaper published in Armenia's regions. That single fact explains much of its importance. Asparez is not a large newspaper by circulation, but it is the principal print and online news institution rooted in Gyumri, Armenia's second largest city, and in the wider Shirak region.

The Gyumri Asparez, founded in 2000, should not be confused with the diaspora newspaper Asbarez founded in Fresno, California, in 1908. It belongs to the post-Soviet rebuilding of regional journalism in Armenia after independence in 1991.

Origins and the Asparez Journalists' Club

The Asparez Journalists' Club was founded on 18 January 2000 in Gyumri by working journalists. Its chairman from its foundation has been Levon Barseghyan, who is recorded as one of the founders of the club and as chairman of its board since 2000. Barseghyan was born on 18 January 1967 in Gyumri and trained originally outside journalism, at the Department of Geophysics of the Faculty of Geology of Yerevan State University from 1984 to 1991, with the speciality of geophysicist-engineer, while also completing the Faculty of Social Professions at the same university in 1989 to 1991 with the speciality of journalist-photojournalist. Before Asparez he had a substantial career in Gyumri media: he worked at the Shant television and radio company from 1994 to 2002 as a journalist, news director, production manager and presenter, was editor-in-chief of the Shant weekly from its establishment in 1995 to 2000, and was executive director of Radio Shant from its establishment in 1998 to 2002. He later served as editor-in-chief of the Gyumri-Asparez magazine from 2001 to 2004.

Gyumri, Shirak and the Regional Press

Gyumri is the administrative centre of Shirak and Armenia's second city, with a history shaped by trade, culture and, in the modern period, by the devastating earthquake of December 1988, whose effects on housing and the local economy lasted for decades. Shirak's media market reflects the difficulties described for regional publishing across Armenia. Media Landscapes notes that regional newspapers in Armenia face high costs for paper, printing, premises and staff, weak advertising markets and poor internet infrastructure, and that many titles registered in the regions are published only rarely or not at all. It records twenty regional newspapers published at least once a month in the country as a whole, with a combined circulation of about 10,000 copies, and many of them do not have even a basic promotional website.

The Newspaper and Its Circulation

Media Landscapes gives the circulation of the Asparez newspaper as 250 to 300 copies. That figure is small even by Armenian standards, and it should be read as the print run recorded by that source rather than as a measure of the outlet's total reach. Asparez itself has described much larger ambitions for print at moments of expansion. In March 2011, reporting by the Journalists for the Future network recorded Barseghyan's plan to launch or relaunch a Gyumri daily within two months, restoring a tradition of morning newspaper reading that he said the regions had been deprived of for more than twenty years. The project was costed at an investment of 80,000 US dollars, not including running costs of about 4,000 dollars a month, and depended on creating printing capacity in Gyumri with donor support. Barseghyan said that Asparez hoped for backing from local and foreign donors and would attempt to print by its own efforts if that support did not arrive.

The details published in 2011 show how the club thought about a regional daily. The paper was to appear initially five days a week and later throughout the week, with an initial circulation of about 200 copies in the first month growing to 1,500 copies over two years, at a planned price of 50 to 80 drams, distributed first in Shirak and then in Lori and Yerevan. Barseghyan stressed that it would not be an entertainment title, but would report critically on abuses, provide pluralism and become the pulse of the city, and that Asparez did not intend to harm Gyumri's existing weeklies, Hingshabti and Shrjapat.

Asparez Online and National Reach

Whatever the limits of the print edition, the website asparez.am gave Asparez a national audience. Open Society Foundations reporting, republished by FreedomInfo in April 2014, described asparez.am as one of the country's top ten news websites and the club as an aspiring government watchdog operating in a media environment marked by distrust of elected officials and of most news outlets. The same reporting quoted Barseghyan's observation that mainstream media had so little credibility that Armenians watched state television using a vice versa approach, taking the opposite of what was presented as the likely truth. Asparez's answer to that distrust was to build its own media where cooperation with existing mass media was not possible, a principle Barseghyan expressed directly: where possible, non-governmental organisations and activists need to cooperate with mass media, and if that is not possible, they need to create mass media.

Freedom of Information Work and PublicData.am

The best documented part of Asparez's work beyond day-to-day news is its freedom of information campaigning and its public spending database, PublicData.am. Launched in 2010 with support from the Open Society Foundations and built with the Geneva-based technology organisation HURIDOCS, PublicData.am published revenue and spending data for schools and provincial governments across Armenia, presented in charted and searchable form. Asparez gathered the underlying information through a steady programme of freedom of information requests: about 3,500 requests a year, sent to more than 900 communities and 1,400 schools, as well as to governors and ministries. Because few local jurisdictions operated online at the time, most submissions and replies were handled on paper and the site was updated manually by the small Asparez team.

When requests were refused or ignored, Asparez used the courts. In the four years after it began its freedom of information campaigning, the club brought fifty-five lawsuits seeking full compliance with Armenia's 2003 freedom of information law, and Barseghyan said it had won or resolved fifty-four of them. That litigation record is central to the club's reputation in Armenian civil society: Asparez is cited in international reporting not only as a newspaper publisher but as a litigant that turned a transparency law into usable public data. The PublicData.am model also illustrates its editorial philosophy, described in the Open Society Foundations reporting as the insight that data publishing is just another form of news publishing.

GALA TV, Freedom of Speech Day and the Events of 2008

Asparez's defining public campaign was its defence of GALA TV, Gyumri's independent television station. GALA's founder, the CHAP company owned by Vahan Khachatrian, came under tax inspection and legal pressure after October 2007, when Khachatrian publicly reported attempts by state agencies to pressure the channel, which had broadcast an address by opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan. Tax authorities imposed a liability of about 26 to 27 million Armenian drams that threatened the station with closure. Barseghyan was a founder and one of the coordinators of the headquarters for the protection of GALA TV in 2007 and 2008, and Asparez led the civic campaign in its support, including a fundraising telethon launched in Gyumri on 19 March 2008.

The campaign took place after the February 2008 presidential election and the March 2008 state of emergency. United States Department of State human rights reporting for 2008, summarised by the Yerevan Press Club, listed an arson attempt against the Journalists' Club on 19 January 2008, the detention of Barseghyan at a rally in Gyumri on 2 March 2008, and the arson on 21 March 2008 of a car belonging to the club's president, Nadezhda Hakobyan, at that time in use by Barseghyan. Barseghyan said he believed the attacks were connected to the defence of GALA and to threatening calls received by the club. The sources consulted attribute legal responsibility for the arson attacks to no named individual, and they are recorded here as reported incidents.

The GALA debt was ultimately paid from funds donated in Armenia and abroad, and Asparez founded Freedom of Speech Day in Gyumri to mark the outcome. It is celebrated on 25 March, the date on which, on 25 March 2009, the campaign succeeded and CHAP recovered the liability that had almost forced GALA to close. Yerevan Press Club and Transparency International Armenia reporting records the day being marked annually in Gyumri, with awards to journalists and civic activists; by March 2013 it was celebrated for the fifth time. Barseghyan himself received the Time of Freedom of Speech prize in 2008 for protecting journalists' rights.

Monitoring, Ethics and Professional Role

Asparez also functioned as a media monitoring organisation. In January 2011, Yerevan Press Club reporting documented letters from Barseghyan to the National Commission on Television and Radio presenting Asparez monitoring of Public Television's First Channel, calculating that advertising on 31 December 2010 occupied 12.6 percent of measured airtime against a legal limit of 7 percent, with breaches also recorded on 14 and 15 January 2011. The episode shows the club applying the same evidence-based method to national broadcasting that it applied to public spending.

Within Armenia's professional structures, Barseghyan was a member of the Media Ethics Observatory established on 10 March 2007 under the Yerevan Press Club self-regulation initiative, and international media sustainability reporting groups Asparez with Armenia's principal professional organisations providing training, legal advice and advocacy for journalists' rights. He also headed the Gyumri Anti-Corruption Centre in 2008 to 2010 and was a founding member of the South Caucasus Human Rights Network from June 2009.

Economics and Challenges

The economics of Asparez cannot be separated from those of Armenian print as a whole. Media Landscapes describes newspaper printing in Armenia as loss-making, with an average cover price of about 100 drams against a prime cost of 140 to 150 drams, virtually no commercial advertising and heavy dependence on sponsors. Barseghyan's own diagnosis in 2011 was that the poor condition of Armenian newspapers and their small readerships reflected a failure to meet society's needs properly, and that price alone did not explain low sales. That helps explain why Asparez combined news with services its region could use directly: public spending data, legal challenges to withheld information and defence of the region's independent broadcaster.

Current verified information about the newspaper's present print schedule and staffing is limited in the sources consulted, and no more recent certified circulation figure was found. The 250 to 300 copy figure should be treated as the recorded position in the Media Landscapes profile, not as a present-day audited total.

Place in Armenian Media

Asparez occupies a place in Armenian media out of proportion to its print run. It demonstrates that a regional institution can set a national agenda when it works on national questions, freedom of information, broadcast compliance and freedom of speech, from a regional base. At the same time it remains rooted in Gyumri and Shirak in a way that Yerevan outlets are not: its campaigns concerned Gyumri's television station, Gyumri's municipality and the public money spent in communities and schools across the country, gathered community by community. For anyone mapping Armenian newspapers by region rather than only by capital-city prominence, Asparez is the essential Shirak title: the region's daily newspaper, published by its journalists' club, and the clearest example in Armenia of the newspaper as civic institution.