About EVN Report

EVN Report

EVN Report is a non-profit online news magazine based in Yerevan, Armenia, publishing in English for an international and diaspora audience. Founded on 6 March 2017 by Maria Titizian and Roubina Margossian, it takes its name from EVN, the airport code for Yerevan's Zvartnots International Airport, a symbol of connection between Armenia and the world. From its office at 31 Moskovyan Street in Yerevan, EVN Report has built a reputation for long-form reporting, analysis and commentary that explains Armenia in depth rather than chasing the hourly news cycle.

The magazine rose to prominence during the 2018 Velvet Revolution, when it became a major English-language source on Armenia at a moment when the world's attention suddenly turned to Yerevan. Its story is also a story about a gap in Armenian media: before EVN Report, there was no sustained English-language publication telling in-depth Armenian stories to Armenians worldwide and to foreign readers. This profile sets out the verified facts of its founding, people, mission, funding and influence.

Founding and the Gap It Set Out to Fill

EVN Report was founded on 6 March 2017 in Yerevan. Its media arm is the EVN News Foundation, registered in the Republic of Armenia in 2017. The founders were Maria Titizian, who became founding editor-in-chief, and Roubina Margossian, who became managing editor. Reporting by the International Press Institute on the magazine's origins explains that EVN Report emerged in the aftermath of the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh fighting, often called the Four-Day War. At that time Titizian and Margossian recognised a significant gap in Armenia's media landscape: there was no English-language publication representing Armenians worldwide and telling in-depth stories of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and of Armenia itself.

Titizian has summarised the motivation plainly: when a country is in conflict, it tends to become insular, and the founders wanted to do something against that tendency. The two journalists launched EVN Report with minimal initial funding, consisting of small donations from its board members, and began at the Yerevan Impact Hub incubator centre before moving into its own office space in 2019. That modest beginning matters because EVN Report was never the digital arm of a newspaper, television station or political organisation. It was a start-up built around an editorial idea, that Armenia needed a credible English voice of its own.

Founders and Editorial Leadership

Maria Titizian is a Yerevan-based writer, journalist and educator with more than twenty years of experience in the media industry. Her reporting has taken her across Armenia, Artsakh, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. She has worked as an anchor at Armenia's Public TV, served as associate editor of the United States-based Armenian Reporter, and was managing editor at CivilNet before founding EVN Report. She has appeared on international networks including Al Jazeera and the BBC to discuss events in Armenia and Artsakh. For the past decade she has also lectured in the English and Communications Department at the American University of Armenia and assisted the university in developing a Master of Journalism programme.

Roubina Margossian serves as managing editor and is, with Titizian and programmes manager Heghine Gyulnazaryan, part of the small core team described in feature reporting on the magazine. That small scale is a defining feature. EVN Report is not a large newsroom; it is a compact editorial team working with a wider circle of contributors, analysts, photographers and translators. Readers should understand its output accordingly: fewer items than a news wire, but items chosen for depth, context and lasting relevance, including essays, interviews, explainers and special series as well as news analysis.

Mission and Editorial Approach

EVN Report states its mission as empowering Armenia, inspiring the diaspora and informing the world through sound, credible and fact-based reporting and commentary, with the goal of increasing public trust in the media. Each element of that sentence does work. Empowering Armenia points to domestic readers who need policy scrutiny. Inspiring the diaspora points to the millions of Armenians abroad who follow the homeland unevenly. Informing the world points to diplomats, researchers, journalists and investors who otherwise encounter Armenia only during wars or crises.

Besides covering current news, EVN Report places emphasis on policy areas it considers neglected by other outlets. Its pages have carried sustained work on social affairs, governance, security, the economy, culture, technology and the environment, as well as personal and literary writing rooted in Armenian places. A recurring feature format, EVN Walks, has presented ordinary people, architects, professors, editors and visitors walking through neighbourhoods of Yerevan and other places while reflecting on their lives and work. Such formats signal an editorial belief that a country is understood through its people and streets as well as through its ministries and battlefields.

The Velvet Revolution Breakthrough

EVN Report began publishing in 2017 but launched to prominence during the 2018 Velvet Revolution in Armenia, as a major source of English-language reporting on the protests that forced Serzh Sargsyan to resign and brought Nikol Pashinyan to power. Freedom House noted that EVN Report and Azatutyun.am saw their reach expand dramatically thanks to their coverage of the April and May 2018 events. For many foreign correspondents and diaspora readers arriving at Armenian news for the first time that spring, EVN Report was the explainer that made names, parties and histories intelligible in English.

The breakthrough created both opportunity and expectation. After 2018, EVN Report was no longer a small incubator project; it was treated internationally as a global voice of Armenia. Maintaining that position through the far darker years that followed, including the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the 2023 displacement of Artsakh's Armenian population, required a different kind of reporting: slower, more sombre and often focused on security, loss and accountability. The magazine's own contributors have reflected that Armenia after those events is not a country in mourning that has stopped living, but a society that must keep building because stopping would be more dangerous than continuing. That sensibility, analytical without being detached, is characteristic of EVN Report's voice.

Language, Audience and Diaspora Connection

EVN Report publishes in English. That single-language choice sets it apart from most Armenian outlets, which typically publish in Armenian with Russian and English editions. By choosing English as its primary language, EVN Report addresses readers who are often underserved by Armenian media: second and third generation diaspora Armenians, mixed families, foreign spouses, researchers, aid workers, diplomats and international journalists. Its headquarters remain in Yerevan and its subject is Armenia, but its readership is global.

The name itself reinforces that positioning. EVN is the code travellers see on luggage tags and departure boards for Yerevan. For diaspora readers, it evokes arrival and departure, the rhythm of a homeland visited as well as lived in. Feature writing about the magazine has described its office near Yerevan's Opera House as a gathering place where collaborators visit to deliberate over coffee about pressing issues and missing stories. Whether or not every reader knows that detail, the product reflects it: a magazine edited in Yerevan, in conversation with Armenians everywhere.

Funding Model and Non-Profit Status

EVN Report is a non-profit organisation funded through donations made by readers. It has also received a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, documented in the endowment's Armenia reporting for 2018. Its own site invites readers to subscribe and support its work, and its mission materials are published under the EVN News Foundation registered in 2017. There is no proprietor, political party or media holding behind the magazine in the public record, and no paywall model has defined its identity; its sustainability pitch is that readers who value independent English-language reporting on Armenia should help pay for it.

Donor and reader funding brings independence from domestic advertisers and owners, but it also brings fragility. Grants are project-based and reader donations fluctuate with attention, which spikes during crises and falls between them, exactly when sustained analysis is most needed. EVN Report's survival since 2017 on minimal initial funding and continued donations is therefore part of its story, not a footnote to it. Public sources do not provide a complete audited financial picture, and this profile does not estimate budgets or staff costs that cannot be verified.

Coverage Through War and Transformation

Any English-language magazine about Armenia founded in 2017 has had to cover an extraordinary sequence: a revolution in 2018, a major war in 2020, border escalations, the blockade and then the exodus of Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenian population in 2023, and continuing negotiations and tensions with Azerbaijan and Turkey, alongside domestic debates about democracy, the constitution, the economy and relations with Russia and the West. EVN Report's archive reflects that sequence, with analysis of negotiations, stalemate and escalation, explainers on diplomacy and security, and essays on dignity, human rights and social policy.

Titizian's public academic engagement illustrates the magazine's role in that coverage. She has been invited to speak to university audiences abroad on fighting misinformation amid a security crisis and on the Armenian media landscape, drawing on EVN Report's reporting on the 2020 Artsakh war, the 2023 events in Nagorno-Karabakh and hybrid threats against Armenia. When the editor of a small Yerevan magazine is asked to explain Armenia's information war to foreign universities, it indicates that the magazine functions as more than a publication; it is an interpreter of Armenia for the outside world.

Relationship to the Wider Armenian Media Ecosystem

EVN Report does not compete directly with Armenian-language daily portals such as News.am, Tert.am or 1in.am, which publish high volumes of short news in Armenian, Russian and English. It occupies a complementary niche: depth in English. Armenian journalists themselves read it, foreign correspondents cite it, and diaspora organisations share its explainers. Its founders' careers connect it to that ecosystem, Titizian through Public TV, the Armenian Reporter and CivilNet, and its contributors include analysts and writers who also appear in other Armenian and international outlets.

International media-development reporting, including by the International Press Institute, has presented EVN Report as an example of media innovation in Armenia, a small outlet elevating public discourse amid crisis and transformation. That framing captures both its strength and its limit. A magazine can elevate discourse for the readers it reaches; it cannot by itself fix a polarised information environment marked, as Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders document, by disinformation, political pressure and economic precarity. EVN Report's contribution is specific and verifiable: it created a durable English-language space where Armenian affairs are examined carefully, by Armenians, for the world.

Education and Public Engagement

Through Titizian's teaching at the American University of Armenia and her role in developing its Master of Journalism programme, EVN Report is linked to the formal training of Armenian journalists. That connection matters in a small media market where newsrooms and universities overlap and where English-language analytical writing is a skill in short supply. The magazine's special series, podcasts and walks, its long editorial lunches and brainstorming described by visitors, and its willingness to publish younger and foreign contributors settling in Yerevan all point to an incubator function beyond its article count.

Public engagement also includes newsletters, subscriptions and social distribution, through which EVN Report reaches readers who may never visit its homepage. Detailed subscriber and traffic figures are not published in verifiable open sources, so this profile makes no claim about their size. What is documented is longevity and continued output: a magazine launched in March 2017 still publishing, still headquartered on Moskovyan Street, and still edited by its founder nearly a decade later, in a market where many digital projects disappear within a few years.

Assessment and Open Questions

The verified record for EVN Report is clear on identity, founding date and founders, non-profit status, headquarters, language, mission, Velvet Revolution prominence and grant support including from the National Endowment for Democracy. It is thinner on internal matters: exact current staff size, annual budgets, audience analytics and future plans are not fully documented in open sources and should not be guessed.

Judged on what can be verified, EVN Report filled a real gap and filled it at exactly the moment Armenia most needed it filled. A year after its launch, Armenia experienced a revolution the world wanted to understand; five years later, it experienced wars and displacement the world struggled to follow. Throughout, a small Yerevan magazine provided English-language reporting and commentary rooted in the country itself. That is the factual basis of its reputation, and it is sufficient without embellishment.