About Infocom.am

Infocom.am

Overview

Infocom.am is the website of Infocom, an independent Armenian online news outlet based in Yerevan. It publishes news and multimedia in Armenian and covers politics, society and regional developments, with a distinctive emphasis on data-driven reporting. Infocom began during the Armenian Velvet Revolution of 2018, when it became the first Armenian news channel on Telegram, and it has since developed from an improvised revolution-era information service into an institutional newsroom with its own video production department, open databases and a podcast aimed at young listeners.

The outlet's editor-in-chief is Sevak Mamyan, who has explained its working philosophy in interviews with the Prague Civil Society Centre, one of its supporters. Data is the basis of our work, Mamyan says, and that single sentence captures what separates Infocom from the many Armenian portals that compete mainly on the speed of political news. Infocom treats public registries, asset declarations, procurement records and other official data as primary reporting material, and it builds investigations out of what those records show.

Origins in the 2018 Velvet Revolution

Infocom was started during the turbulent days of the Velvet Revolution in the spring of 2018, the peaceful protest movement that forced Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign and brought Nikol Pashinyan to power. In a period when streets filled daily, roads were blocked and official information lagged behind events, there was an intense public demand for quick and reliable updates. Infocom answered that demand on Telegram, the messaging platform whose channels allow a small team to reach thousands of readers instantly, and it was, by its own account reported by the Prague Civil Society Centre, the first Armenian news channel to do so.

The response was immediate. The channel gathered an audience of more than 10,000 people within days. As Mamyan has put it, that level of trust left the team with no choice but to continue its work and put it on a more institutional basis. The remark captures a common trajectory in post-revolution Armenian media: projects born as volunteer or improvised services during the protests either dissolved when the streets emptied or, like Infocom, converted their moment of trust into permanent newsrooms with staff, formats and funding.

From Telegram Channel to News Website

Infocom.am is the mature form of that conversion. The website publishes news in Armenian, while distribution continues to run heavily through social media and video platforms, a pattern typical of Armenia's digital news market, where many readers encounter stories first on Telegram, Facebook or YouTube rather than on a homepage. The seed directory descriptions of Infocom note exactly this pattern: a post-2018 outlet that grew with Armenia's expanding digital news market and distributes heavily via social and video channels.

In the years after 2018, the outlet experimented with various formats and topics. According to the Prague Civil Society Centre's profile, it deliberately covered areas often overlooked by mainstream media, including social inequalities, regional politics and education in Armenia. Its stated mission has been consistent through those experiments: to empower the Armenian public to make informed decisions. That mission explains both its choice of neglected subjects and its later turn toward data, since information that citizens can check for themselves is a direct form of empowerment.

Coverage Beyond the Capital

Although Infocom is a Yerevan-based outlet, its reporting is not confined to the capital. The team regularly travels to different regions of Armenia to cover local issues, and it organises public discussions on topics such as media literacy. Regional coverage matters in Armenia, where national media are heavily concentrated in Yerevan and where municipal politics, schools, roads and local officials outside the capital receive far less scrutiny than national institutions.

The outlet's regional presence also feeds its election work. In preparation for the parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2026, Infocom set out to build an interactive voting map combining data analysis with live reporting from polling stations. The team tested its approach during the municipal elections in Gyumri, Armenia's second city, to learn what worked before the national vote. That combination of field reporting and data presentation, rehearsed locally and applied nationally, is characteristic of how Infocom plans its journalism.

Data-Driven Investigations

The work for which Infocom is now best documented is its use of public registries. In recent years the outlet has shifted its focus toward data drawn from official records, treating those records as its key asset. Its investigations have exposed widespread non-filing of asset declarations by public officials across Armenia, as well as several high-profile cases of illicit donations and corruption. Public officials in Armenia are required to declare their assets, and a declaration that is missing or implausible is a concrete, checkable fact, not an allegation.

The reporting has had measurable effects. According to the Prague Civil Society Centre, Infocom's findings led to fines and prompted the state's anti-corruption mechanisms to revise their methodology. Mamyan recounts, with amusement, that the newsroom received a phone call from the Corruption Prevention Commission asking how the journalists had managed to obtain all the information. The answer, implicit in the outlet's method, is that the information was public all along; what Infocom supplied was the labour and skill to assemble it. The outlet describes its approach as data activism.

Open Databases and Public Resources

Consistent with that philosophy, Infocom regularly creates open databases based on its investigations, focused mainly on public contracts, procurement and tax evasion. Researchers, public institutions and other media can use these databases for their own work. This is a notable choice for a small newsroom: instead of hoarding the material behind a single story, Infocom publishes the underlying dataset so that its reporting can be checked, extended and reused.

Open databases also change the relationship between an outlet and its audience. A reader who doubts a conclusion can inspect the records; a local journalist in a region the national media rarely visit can search contracts or declarations affecting their own community. In a media environment where trust is scarce and political camps accuse each other of fabrication, verifiable data is a form of credibility that opinion cannot match. Infocom's reputation among its supporters rests substantially on this practice.

Video Production and Podcasting

In 2022, with the support of the Prague Civil Society Centre, Infocom created a separate video production department called Infocom Production. The department was also an attempt to monetise the team's skills and generate income, which helped sustain the newsroom on occasions when public funding was delayed or unavailable. That detail is an unusually frank glimpse of the economics of independent Armenian media, where grant cycles rarely match payroll and commercial services can bridge the gaps.

The outlet's YouTube channel has passed 13,000 subscribers and more than two million total views, figures reported by the Prague Civil Society Centre in early 2026. Its podcast CTRL Z, moderated by two hosts in their early twenties, targets Armenia's Generation Z audience with interviews with well-known figures from the country's political and journalistic life. Despite statistics suggesting that most Armenian young people are not interested in politics, the show quickly gained tens of thousands of views, evidence, in the outlet's reading, that political content can reach young audiences when it is made in an engaging form.

Funding and Independence

Infocom is described by its supporters as an independent outlet, and the Prague Civil Society Centre, a Czech-based organisation supporting civil society and independent media in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, has publicly documented its support. Grant support of this kind is the standard economic foundation for data-driven and investigative journalism in Armenia, where the advertising market is small and politically influenced ownership is common among larger outlets. Infocom's creation of a commercial video arm shows a parallel effort to diversify income so that no single funding delay can silence the newsroom.

Independence for an outlet of this type is best judged by its output. Infocom's best-known investigations have targeted the compliance of public officials under the government that the Velvet Revolution brought to power, the same political transformation during which the outlet was born. Reporting that fines officials and forces an anti-corruption body to change its methods is not the behaviour of a house organ. It is consistent with the mission the outlet states for itself: giving the public information solid enough to act on.

Place in Armenian Media

Infocom.am represents a specific and increasingly important strand of Armenian journalism: the post-2018, digital-first, data-literate newsroom. Armenia has hundreds of news websites, but very few build their identity around public registries, open databases and reproducible analysis. Infocom's first-mover history on Telegram, its regional reporting trips, its media-literacy discussions and its youth podcast together describe an outlet trying to build an informed public, not merely an audience.

For readers and researchers, Infocom is therefore both a news source and a reference source. Its stories report events; its databases preserve the evidence behind recurring questions about who holds assets, who wins public contracts and who avoids tax. In a country still arguing, years after the Velvet Revolution, about whether institutions have truly changed, that kind of durable, checkable record is the outlet's most distinctive contribution to Armenian public life.