About Azg

Azg

Azg is a daily newspaper published in Yerevan, Armenia. Its name means Nation in Armenian, and it has been published since February 1991, making it one of the founding titles of the press of independent Armenia. Azg was the newspaper of the Ramkavar tradition, the Democratic Liberal Party of Armenia, financed through the Armenian diaspora's Democratic Liberal Party, the ADL. In the 1990s it was among the country's most prominent newspapers, described in 1999 as Armenia's most authoritative daily, and it served, in the words of editor Edik Baghdasaryan, as a good school for many journalists who went on to shape Armenian media.

Azg's history contains one of the most dramatic episodes in post-Soviet Armenian journalism. In 1996 the government of President Levon Ter-Petrosyan suspended the newspaper, its office was ransacked, its journalists were beaten, and its ownership was transferred by ministerial decision to a pro-government splinter of its own sponsoring party, which then published a newspaper under Azg's name and logo without Azg's editors. The original newspaper survived that appropriation, supported the next president, and continued into a long period of declining print circulation as an established, smaller daily with an online edition.

Founding in 1991 and the Ramkavar Connection

Azg began publishing in Yerevan in February 1991, in the final months of the Soviet Union and on the eve of Armenian independence. Research published by Media.am on the Armenian press of the 1990s records that in February 1991 the official newspaper of the Ramkavar Liberal Party, called Azg, started publishing in Yerevan and quickly became a leading press outlet in Armenia. The newspaper featured a new structure and division of content and an open editorial section offering reactions and opinions on internal political developments, which the study describes as a significant change for Armenian readers of the time.

Its founder and editor-in-chief was Hakob Avedikian, also rendered Hagop Avedikian, a Lebanese-born veteran Ramkavar activist. In the 1980s Avedikian had served as editor-in-chief of Zartonk, the Ramkavar party's daily in Lebanon, giving him a direct link to the long tradition of Armenian party journalism in the diaspora. Azg was published by the Democratic Liberal Party of Armenia, the Ramkavar-Azatakan party, and financed from the diaspora party, the ADL. That structure set Azg apart from most new Armenian titles: it combined a homeland newsroom with a party tradition and funding network that stretched across the worldwide Armenian diaspora.

The Newspaper of the Early Independence Years

Azg was prominent throughout the 1990s. Its circulation regularly exceeded 30,000 copies by 1993 and rose to about 42,000 the following year, figures that made it one of the largest newspapers in a country of Armenia's size. In the summer of 1991 its editorial pages were already engaged in the central argument of the new state, the dispute between Prime Minister Vazgen Manukyan and Levon Ter-Petrosyan. When Manukyan announced a new political party in July 1991, Azg's editorial judged the decision dangerous, warning that it could divide the national forces and invite Moscow's intervention. The episode, preserved in Media.am's study of 1990s editorials, shows Azg performing the classic role of a party newspaper of the independence period: not merely reporting the formation of the new political order, but arguing about its direction.

The newspaper's influence was also professional. Baghdasaryan's description of Azg as a good school for many journalists reflects the reality that the big dailies of the 1990s trained the generation that later staffed Armenia's television stations, news agencies and online media. Armine Ohanyan, who later founded Hraparak, was among the journalists who worked at Azg before leading a newspaper of her own.

The 1996 Suspension and Seizure

In 1996 the government of President Ter-Petrosyan moved against Azg. The newspaper was temporarily suspended, its office was ransacked, and editors and journalists were beaten. On 22 April 1996 the Ministry of Justice ratified an amendment to the newspaper's statutory documents transferring ownership of Azg to the Mission of the Ramkavar-Azatakan Party, a newly formed pro-government splinter that had broken from the opposition Ramkavar-Azatakan Party and had been registered by the ministry days earlier, on 15 April. The founders of Azg, who owned and published the newspaper, found themselves completely cut off from it. The ministry also ordered the state printing house, Parberakan, to stop printing Azg until told otherwise.

On 27 April 1996 a new eight-page newspaper using the name and logo of Azg was printed by Parberakan without the participation of Azg's editors, who publicly disassociated themselves from the new version. Most of Armenia's media outlets protested at press conferences on 23 and 25 April, expressed solidarity with the Azg staff, and appealed to President Ter-Petrosyan, the chairman of the Constitutional Court and the state prosecutor. The case was reported internationally by Reporters Without Borders through IFEX and remains a standard example, in the literature on post-Soviet media, of a government neutralising a critical newspaper not by banning its title but by legally transferring the title to friendlier hands.

Recovery and the Kocharyan Period

After Ter-Petrosyan's resignation, Azg was restored to its own editorial line and was supportive of Robert Kocharyan, who became president in 1998. In 1999 it was described as Armenia's most authoritative daily. That description marks the high point of the newspaper's authority: within three years it had gone from a suspended and expropriated opposition title to the most respected newspaper in the country under a new administration it supported. The trajectory illustrates a recurring pattern in Armenian media history, in which a newspaper's fortunes rose and fell with its relationship to the presidency, even for a title with its own party tradition and diaspora backing.

Circulation Decline

The 1990s circulation heights did not last. Azg's circulation fell to about 10,000 copies and then to about 3,000 in 2003, where it remained as of 2009. The decline was not unique to Azg. The whole Armenian print market contracted as television consolidated its dominance, as advertising concentrated, and as readers began moving online. But the scale of the fall, from more than 40,000 copies in 1994 to about 3,000 a decade later, captures how completely the conditions that had made the great party dailies of the independence period had disappeared. Azg continued to publish as a daily at the smaller scale, an established title with a loyal readership rather than a mass-circulation paper.

Languages and Online Publishing

Since 1999 Azg has been available online. For a period the online edition appeared in four languages, Armenian, Russian, English and Turkish, an unusually wide offering that reflected both the newspaper's diaspora orientation and an ambition to address readers in neighbouring Turkey in their own language. The English version has not been available since 2012. The Yerevan Press Club's Armenian Press Archive preserved Azg's issues online from January 1999, including its Russian-language version, making the newspaper one of the Armenian titles whose turn-of-the-century record is most accessible to researchers. The current website is azg.am.

Anniversaries and Public Recognition

Azg's standing in Armenian public life was marked at its thirtieth anniversary in February 2021, when President Armen Sarkissian telephoned editor-in-chief Hagop Avedikian to congratulate him and the editorial staff. The president's message described Azg as one of the leaders of the press family of the newly independent Republic of Armenia since its foundation, recalled his own visit to the Azg editorial office thirty years earlier, and expressed confidence that Azg would remain a pillar of the modern Armenian press despite current difficulties. The National Assembly speaker likewise congratulated the newspaper on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2016. Such official recognition, extended across presidencies of very different character, reflects the degree to which Azg had become an institution rather than merely a party organ.

Place in Armenian Media History

Azg is best understood as a bridge between two Armenian press traditions. Behind it stood the diaspora party press, exemplified by Zartonk in Beirut, with its disciplined party identity and its mission to sustain Armenian national life abroad. Ahead of it lay the homeland press of an independent state, in which newspapers had to survive markets, governments and eventually the internet. Azg lived through every stage of that transition: rapid growth as an independence-era party daily, violent suppression and legal expropriation, restoration and official favour, and then the long contraction of Armenian print. Its documentary trail, in Wikipedia's sourced history, in IFEX alerts, in Media.am's editorial studies and in presidential statements, is fuller than that of almost any other Armenian newspaper of its generation.

Assessment

For a directory reader, three facts define Azg. It has been published in Yerevan since 1991 and is among the oldest continuously recognised newspaper titles of independent Armenia. It was created by diaspora-linked Ramkavar journalism under Hakob Avedikian and for a time was the country's most authoritative daily. And it survived an attempt by a government to take its very name away, an episode that still stands in the record of Armenian press freedom. Its modern circulation is modest, as is that of every Armenian print daily, but its historical importance is out of proportion to its present print run. Azg remains the clearest example in Armenia of the party newspaper that outlived the conditions that created it.