About Past

Past

Past is a daily newspaper published in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Its name means Fact or Proof in Armenian, a title that signals the paper's self-presentation as a source of documented political reporting in a media market where opinion, rumour and partisan messaging often compete with verified information. Past publishes in Armenian and operates both as a printed newspaper and through its website, past.am, which carries its reporting to readers who no longer buy a printed copy. The Media Ownership Monitor Armenia records that the newspaper was founded in 2016 and is owned by the individual entrepreneur Varuzhan Babajanyan. It is therefore one of the younger titles in the Armenian national press, launched a quarter of a century after independence, at a moment when Armenia's printed press was already in long-term decline and most new journalistic ventures were being created online rather than on paper.

The decision to launch a printed daily in 2016 deserves attention in itself. By that time, expert assessments of the Armenian media described newspaper publishing as a loss-making business across the board. The average cover price of an Armenian newspaper had remained at around 100 drams for years while production costs rose, print runs across the whole country totalled only a few tens of thousands of copies a day, and commercial advertising in print was described as almost non-existent. A new entrant such as Past therefore entered a market in which survival depended less on sales and advertising than on the commitment and resources of its owner. That ownership pattern, in which a newspaper is sustained by a proprietor with his own public and political profile, is characteristic of much of the Armenian press, and Past's history cannot be separated from the public career of its founder.

Origins and Founding

According to the Media Ownership Monitor Armenia, Past was founded in 2016 by Varuzhan Babajanyan, who is recorded as the newspaper's owner in the legal form of an individual entrepreneur. Babajanyan initially stood at the head of the paper's editorial structures himself. Before the 2017 parliamentary elections he announced on his Facebook page that he was resigning as chairman of the newspaper's editorial board, and in 2018 he announced that he was also stepping down as editor of Past, proposing Artak Tshagharyan as his successor in that role. These announcements were made openly and were connected in each case with Babajanyan's own decision to stand for election, a sequence that illustrates the porous boundary between media ownership and electoral politics in Armenia.

Public reference sources consulted for this profile record relatively little about the newspaper's very first months: no founding editorial programme, launch circulation or founding newsroom roster has been documented in the international sources available. That thinness is itself typical of smaller Armenian titles, whose early history is rarely archived outside the country. What can be stated with confidence is the framework within which Past appeared: a Yerevan-based, Armenian-language daily, owned by a single proprietor, publishing political journalism in print and online from its base in the capital. Readers should treat more detailed claims about the paper's founding that circulate without a named source with caution, since the verifiable record is limited to the ownership, founding year and editorial succession documented by media-monitoring research.

Ownership and Leadership

Ownership is the best-documented aspect of Past's identity. The Media Ownership Monitor Armenia identifies Varuzhan Babajanyan as the owner and records his repeated involvement in politics alongside his media activity. In the 2017 National Assembly elections Babajanyan was nominated as a rating, or territorial, candidate for the Tavush region on behalf of the Tsarukyan bloc, without being a member of the party behind the bloc. The bloc entered parliament, but Babajanyan himself did not win a seat, placing 41st on the relevant list. In the snap parliamentary elections of 2018 he again stood in the Tavush region, this time for the Prosperous Armenia party and again presenting himself as a non-partisan candidate, and was again not elected. In the snap elections of 2021 he stood once more for Prosperous Armenia, which on that occasion failed to enter parliament at all.

The monitoring research also notes a discrepancy in how Babajanyan's party status was recorded in 2021: the Central Election Commission's electoral list identified him as a party member, while Babajanyan himself told researchers that he was not a member and had participated as a non-partisan candidate. The episode is worth recording because it captures a wider feature of Armenian media politics, in which the formal affiliations of media owners are often ambiguous even when their electoral activity is a matter of public record. In addition to Past, Babajanyan founded the website orer.am, and another site, oratert.am, was registered under his name, indicating that his media interests extended beyond the single printed title.

Editorial Leadership After 2018

Artak Tshagharyan serves as editor of Past, having been proposed for the role by Babajanyan when the owner stepped down in 2018 to contest the snap elections of that year. Tshagharyan's own background, as recorded by the Media Ownership Monitor, lies in parliamentary administration rather than in a long public career as a reporter: he previously served as head of the office of Karen Karapetyan, a deputy of the National Assembly during its second and third convocations. Karen Karapetyan is the brother of Samvel Karapetyan, the Russian-based businessman who owns the Tashir group of companies. The monitor records this connection as part of the background of the editor; it does not in itself establish any editorial direction, and this profile does not treat it as doing so.

The succession from Babajanyan to Tshagharyan matters for understanding what kind of newspaper Past is. The paper moved from direct owner-editorship, in which the proprietor personally embodied the title's public identity, to editorship by an appointed professional while ownership remained unchanged. That is a common arrangement in the Armenian press. It also means that assessments of Past need to distinguish between the owner's political biography, which is unusually well documented because of his three election campaigns, and the day-to-day editorial product, which is produced under Tshagharyan's editorship and should be judged on its published content.

Content and Coverage

Past primarily covers political topics. The Media Ownership Monitor records that the newspaper features thematic sections including Reflections and Foreign Press, alongside its main news reporting. The Reflections section gives space to commentary and interpretation, while a Foreign Press section, a long-standing feature of Armenian newspapers, presents Armenian readers with translated or summarised material from media outside the country, placing domestic developments in an international frame. Political coverage in the Armenian daily press conventionally centres on the government and the National Assembly, the opposition parties, elections, foreign policy, relations with Russia and the European institutions, and the unresolved questions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia's borders.

Past's political commentary has on occasion been reported beyond Armenia. In October 2026, Azerbaijani news outlets summarised an article in Past arguing that a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Armenia's parliamentary elections exposed shortcomings in the electoral process and signalled growing European distrust of the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, despite the report's broadly positive overall assessment. The example is cited here not for its subject matter but because it shows the paper performing the classic function of an Armenian political daily: close reading of an official international document, and editorial argument built on the gap it perceived between the document's findings and its conclusions. Such interpretive political journalism, rather than large-scale original reporting, is the characteristic product of Yerevan's small daily newspapers.

Print, Circulation and the Online Edition

The Media Ownership Monitor records Past's print circulation as 2,000 copies. In the context of the Armenian market that figure is unremarkable rather than small: expert surveys describe individual Armenian periodicals typically circulating between about 2,000 and 4,000 copies, with total daily circulation across the country of roughly 35,000 copies. Even the largest-circulation Armenian daily has been recorded at around 10,000 copies. Print runs of this size mean that the printed edition of a paper such as Past functions largely as a flagship and an archive of record, while the larger part of its potential audience encounters its journalism, if at all, through its website and through quotation and discussion on social media.

The online edition, published at past.am, is therefore central to the newspaper's operation. The shift from print to online is the defining structural change in Armenian journalism of the past two decades: as internet access became cheaper, metropolitan newspapers built online versions, print readership aged, and younger Armenians moved to digital sources. Media Landscapes, the European Journalism Centre's country survey, notes that print in Armenia is read mainly by the older generation, while online media are preferred by the young for speed. Past, founded in 2016 with print and online operations from an early stage, belongs to the generation of Armenian titles designed for that dual existence rather than converted to it.

Past and the Armenian Press Landscape

To understand Past's position, it helps to place it in the landscape described by media researchers. Armenia's print sector is small, fragmented and economically fragile. Under the 2003 law on mass information, print media may be published without prior registration or licensing, which makes even an exact count of titles difficult; surveys describe 11 daily newspapers and several dozen periodicals appearing at least weekly. Because the advertising market is immature, newspapers rely heavily on sponsors, parties or individual benefactors, and researchers divide the press broadly into titles supporting the authorities and titles aligned with the opposition, with little middle ground. A proprietor-owned political daily founded in 2016 fits squarely within that structure.

Past also illustrates the career pattern in which Armenian newspaper figures move between media and parliament. EurasiaNet, reporting on journalists entering politics, identified the former editor-in-chief of Past, Varuzhan Babajanyan, among the newspaper editors appearing on party lists at election time, alongside counterparts from other Yerevan titles. The movement of editors into electoral politics, and of political staff into editorships, is a recurring theme of Armenian public life and one of the reasons media-ownership transparency has been a persistent demand of Armenian press-freedom organisations. For readers of Past, the practical consequence is that the newspaper's ownership and the political biography of its owner are part of the public context in which its political coverage is read.

Language, Audience and Reach

Past publishes in Armenian, the state language and the language of the overwhelming majority of Armenia's population, and its natural audience is the Armenian-reading public in Yerevan and the regions, together with diaspora readers who follow Armenian politics online. The paper's Yerevan base places it at the centre of the country's political reporting: the government, the National Assembly, the courts, the parties and the diplomatic missions are all in the capital, and the national daily press is overwhelmingly a capital-city press. Regional distribution of printed newspapers in Armenia has been weak since the collapse of the Soviet distribution system, which reinforces the importance of the online edition for any reach beyond Yerevan.

No independently audited readership figures for Past are available in the sources consulted for this profile, and the newspaper's audience should not be exaggerated. Its verified circulation of 2,000 printed copies places it in the broad middle band of Armenian dailies, and its influence, like that of its peers, is exercised less through mass readership than through the circulation of its arguments among politicians, officials, other journalists and politically engaged readers, including through republication and social-media discussion of individual articles.

Assessment and Open Questions

Past is a small but genuine part of Armenia's national press: a Yerevan daily founded in 2016, publishing political journalism in Armenian in print and at past.am, with a recorded circulation of 2,000 copies, thematic sections for commentary and foreign-press material, and an editorial succession from its owner, Varuzhan Babajanyan, to editor Artak Tshagharyan in 2018. Its owner's three unsuccessful parliamentary candidacies, for the Tsarukyan bloc in 2017 and for Prosperous Armenia in 2018 and 2021, are documented in election records and monitoring research and form part of the paper's public identity.

At the same time, this profile openly records the limits of the available evidence. English-language and international documentation on Past is thin: the principal structured source is the Media Ownership Monitor Armenia entry, supplemented by election reporting. Details that readers might expect, such as the paper's exact publication schedule across the week, its staffing, its founding editorial team beyond its owner, and any circulation trend since the monitor's figure was recorded, are not verifiable from the sources consulted and have therefore been omitted rather than estimated. Where the record improves, through Armenian-language monitoring or the paper's own disclosures, this account should be updated; until then, the verified core set out above is the sound basis on which to describe the newspaper.