About ArmNews

ArmNews

ArmNews, rendered Armnews TV, was a private news television channel based in Yerevan, Armenia, broadcasting rolling news in Armenian. It was launched on 31 October 2001 and closed on 10 February 2022, after it was unable to renew its licence. Together with ATV and Armenia TV it formed part of the PanArmenian Media group, and in its final corporate form it was owned by Qaryak Media. Readers should note the tense used in this profile: although older directories and this directory's seed record describe ArmNews in the present tense as a rolling news channel, the documented record shows that the channel ceased broadcasting in February 2022 and was replaced by Armenian Business News. This profile records its full verified life — launch, holding-company years, the celebrated agreement that returned A1+ news to television, ownership in its final period and closure.

Launch and Early Ownership

ArmNews launched on 31 October 2001, at the moment when Armenian private television was consolidating after the first licensing law of 2000. Its corporate origins were layered, as media ownership investigations documented in unusual detail. The company's founder was Cinemax Ltd; Cinemax in turn was founded by Hermes CJSC and ArmNews CJSC. The co-founders of Hermes were lawmaker Harutyun Pambukyan, with 52.5 per cent, and an investment company registered in the British Virgin Islands with 47.5 per cent. Investigators recorded the founding capital of ArmNews as 140,100,000 Armenian drams divided into shares of 10,000 drams, while noting that the full stock ownership was not known and that foreign capital was likely involved, possibly including Gerard Cafesjian, the co-founder of Armenia TV.

The same investigations record a striking allegation about the channel's licensing: that ArmNews was granted a broadcast frequency at a time when no such registered media outlet yet existed, the bid having been placed by Cinemax using the technical resources of ArmNews. The allegation was published by Hetq's media ownership reporting and is recorded here as a documented claim from that investigation, not as an adjudicated fact. What is not in dispute is the channel's trajectory: on 4 September 2004 the launch of CS Media, also known as Armenia Media Holding, publicly grouped ArmNews with Armenia TV and other television and radio companies under the Cafesjian-Sargsyan ownership umbrella.

The PanArmenian Media Years

ArmNews later formed part of the PanArmenian Media Group, the large holding that also included Armenia TV, ATV, Lav Radio, Radio Jan and the news website Tert.am. Within that structure ArmNews was the group's dedicated news channel, complementing Armenia TV's generalist schedule and ATV's talk and series mix with continuous news. The group's United States-facing service, Panarmenian TV, founded in 2013, described ArmNews among the portfolio channels whose programming served the Armenian diaspora in America.

The 2010 Digital Licence Tender

ArmNews was also one of the Yerevan applicants in Armenia's 2010 digital broadcasting licence tender — the competition in which A1+, the independent channel removed from the air in 2002, again failed to win a frequency. Contemporary reporting records that the most contested of those late-2010 contests pitted A1+ against ArmNews, and that the regulator ruled in ArmNews's favour. ArmNews was widely reputed in that period to be controlled by Mikael Minasyan, a son-in-law of President Serzh Sargsyan — a reputation recorded by RFE/RL in its reporting, and consistent with the Media Ownership Monitor's broader account of informal influence over major outlets in the Sargsyan era. The channel's formal ownership in its last years is documented separately below; the Minasyan association belongs to the reported, not the registry, record.

The A1+ Agreement

The most historically significant episode in ArmNews's life came more than a decade after its launch. A1+, Armenia's leading independent broadcaster until it lost its licence in April 2002, had specialised in online news reporting and video production since being taken off air, and had failed in more than a dozen tenders to win another frequency. At a joint news conference in Yerevan, A1+'s owner Mesrop Movsesian and ArmNews executive producer Artak Aleksanian announced a surprise agreement: ArmNews would air every evening a 20-minute news bulletin produced by A1+. Aleksanian stated that the news programmes would be fully prepared by the A1+ TV company and that ArmNews would not interfere in the editorial policy of those programmes; the agreement was signed for one year and could be extended by mutual consent.

Movsesian insisted that he did not expect censorship of the new programmes and ruled out changes to A1+'s editorial policy as a result of the deal, which he described as a business arrangement. The agreement returned the country's best-known independent newsroom to terrestrial television screens — on the frequencies of a channel reputed to be government-friendly, and one that had beaten A1+ in the 2010 tender. RFE/RL, which reported the announcement, dated A1+'s original removal to a highly disputed tender and noted that none of the other Yerevan private channels had regularly aired criticism of government policies in the intervening years. For media historians the ArmNews-A1+ arrangement remains the emblematic compromise of that era of Armenian broadcasting.

Final Ownership: Hrachya Keshishyan and Qaryak Media

The owner of the channel from 2015 until its closing was Hrachya Keshishyan, according to the channel's own About Us information as preserved in reference works. In its final form the channel's owner is listed as Qaryak Media — also transliterated Karyak Media — a holding founded and owned by four former Republican Party parliamentarians, according to a study of Armenian media ownership, which counted ArmNews among the most-watched television outlets in its survey period. After the PanArmenian Media Group ceased activities in 2019 at its shareholders' request, ArmNews, together with Lav Radio and Tert.am, joined Quarry Media; that company itself dissolved in 2022, the year of the channel's closure.

Format, Website and Final Years

ArmNews broadcast in 1080i HDTV from Yerevan, and its official website was armnewstv.am. The website address survives in listings, but the service it belonged to does not: the channel is a closed outlet, and this profile is written throughout in the past tense.

Closure in February 2022

On 10 February 2022 ArmNews was shut down after it was unable to renew its licence. The announcement that Karyak Media was ceasing its activities is the source preserved in reference works for the closure. The channel was replaced by Armenian Business News. Its closure removed from Armenian television the dedicated rolling-news channel that had operated since 2001, and it coincided with the dissolution of Quarry Media, the last holding structure through which ArmNews had passed after the PanArmenian group wound down in 2019.

What the Closure Ended

The closure also closed a chapter in the structure of Armenian news television. For two decades the country's news broadcasting had been organised around the public channel's bulletins, the news programmes of the big generalist channels and ArmNews as the specialist news service — a service whose ownership history, from Cinemax and Hermes through CS Media and PanArmenian to Qaryak Media, tracked the consolidation and then the unravelling of Armenia's politically connected media holdings.

Assessment and Seed Correction

This profile corrects the premise of its own seed record in one important respect. The seed described ArmNews as a currently broadcasting rolling news channel, citing its participation in the 2010 digital licence tender and the A1+ programme arrangement. Research for this profile established from reference works and the preserved closure announcement that the channel in fact closed on 10 February 2022, having launched on 31 October 2001 — facts the seed omitted. The seed's other elements check out: the channel was Yerevan-based, Armenian-language, an applicant in the 2010 tender, and the carrier of A1+-produced weekday news programming after A1+ lost its own licence.

ArmNews matters to the record of Armenian media for three verifiable reasons: it was the country's specialist news channel for just over twenty years; it was a core asset in each of the major private holdings of its era, which makes its corporate history a map of Armenian media consolidation; and its agreement to carry A1+ news bulletins without editorial interference was a rare, publicly documented bridge between the government-friendly and independent camps of Armenian broadcasting. It is profiled here as a closed channel, in the past tense, on the strength of that documented record.