About Zhoghovurd

Zhoghovurd

Zhoghovurd is an Armenian-language daily newspaper published in Yerevan, Armenia. Its name means People in Armenian. The newspaper is edited by Knar Manukyan and publishes online as Armlur.am, one of the recognised news websites of the Armenian capital. Zhoghovurd is known in the Armenian media landscape for two things above all: its unsigned editorials, written in the classical institutional voice of a newspaper rather than in the signed voice of its editor, and its repeated confrontations with the authorities, which have included a criminal investigation over leaked testimony, lawsuits, the revocation of its journalists' parliamentary accreditation, and the forcible removal of two of its journalists from the parliament building.

Those confrontations have made Zhoghovurd one of the most frequently mentioned Armenian newspapers in international press-freedom reporting of the 2020s. At the same time, basic reference information about the newspaper is thinner than for older Armenian titles: its record has to be assembled from press-club studies, court reporting and the statements of journalistic organisations rather than from a single consolidated history. This profile states what that record supports and notes openly where it runs out.

Founding and Identity

Zhoghovurd is a comparatively recent addition to the Yerevan daily press. The clearest public marker of its founding is an official one: on 1 February 2016 the Speaker of the National Assembly, Galust Sahakyan, issued a congratulatory message on the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Zhoghovurd newspaper, which places its launch at the beginning of 2011. The newspaper thus belongs to the generation of Armenian dailies founded after the 2008 election crisis, alongside Hraparak, rather than to the independence-era generation of Azg and Aravot. It established itself as a daily in Armenian from Yerevan, covering politics and public affairs, and developed Armlur.am as its website, a name under which much of its journalism now appears and by which media monitors frequently identify it, in the form Zhoghovurd daily, Armlur.am website.

Editorial Leadership

The editor-in-chief of Zhoghovurd is Knar Manukyan, who is also widely referred to in Armenian reporting with the spelling Knar Manukian. She is one of the most visible newspaper editors in Armenia, in part because the newspaper's disputes with the authorities have so often centred on her personally: on her sources, her telephone records, her accreditation and her conduct in the parliament building. RFE/RL's Armenian service has interviewed her repeatedly in that capacity since at least 2019, when she spoke as the editor facing criminal proceedings over leaked testimony. Manukyan has consistently framed her defence in profession-wide terms, presenting Zhoghovurd's cases as tests of the rights of all Armenian journalists, a framing that journalistic organisations in Armenia have generally supported.

The Unsigned Editorial Tradition

A Yerevan Press Club study of the use of open editorials and commentary in Armenian media singles Zhoghovurd out for its editorial practice. The study found that Zhoghovurd, through Armlur.am, is closer in the classical sense to the practice of the editorial article than its competitors: its readers can regularly read unsigned articles, seven such materials during the monitored month of February, containing the elements typical of columns, namely opinion, attitude and emotion, placed in the space usually allocated to editorials. The contrast drawn in the same study is instructive. In Hraparak every editorial column was signed by the editor-in-chief, and in Aravot the editor's column was a signed personal feature. Zhoghovurd instead speaks institutionally, in the name of the newspaper rather than of a person. In a media market dominated by personality-led titles, that is a deliberate and distinguishing editorial choice, and it matches the collective meaning of the newspaper's name.

Coverage and Political Position

Zhoghovurd covers Armenian domestic politics, parliament, government, corruption questions and social affairs. Its editorials quoted in RFE/RL press reviews take positions on the central controversies of the day; in June 2018, for example, in the first weeks of the post-revolution government, Zhoghovurd wrote that the Yerkrapah Union of veterans had to cease to be the only pillar of the state and the army and stop exerting a suppressing influence on political developments. The newspaper has been grouped by Freedom House with the opposition and independent papers that faced politically charged defamation litigation in Armenia, and its more recent record is one of sustained friction with the post-2018 authorities, particularly with the leadership of the National Assembly. That friction should not be read as a fixed party alignment; it is the documented pattern of a newspaper whose parliamentary reporting has repeatedly brought it into conflict with the institution it covers.

The Leaked Testimony Case

In 2019 Zhoghovurd published leaked testimonies given by former president Serzh Sarkisian and other former officials interrogated over the 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan. The Special Investigative Service opened criminal proceedings against Manukyan in connection with what it regarded as illegal revelations, and repeatedly questioned her. When she refused to disclose the source of the leak, the service asked a district court judge in Yerevan to allow it to obtain her mobile telephone records, and the judge granted the request. Manukyan appealed. In January 2020 the Court of Appeals backed her claim that the authorisation of the disclosure of her calls had been illegal. Prosecutors appealed in turn, but in May 2020 Armenia's Court of Cassation rejected their appeal. Manukyan hailed the outcome as a victory for all Armenian journalists, saying the paper had aimed to prove that the investigative service and the prosecutor-general's office had broken the law, and had succeeded. The case is one of the clearest modern Armenian precedents on the protection of journalistic sources.

Parliamentary Accreditation Disputes

Zhoghovurd's parliamentary reporting produced a second long-running conflict. In December 2023 the National Assembly staff notified the newspaper that Manukyan, an accredited parliamentary journalist, had received a warning, and that because it was her second warning that year her accreditation was revoked. The first warning had followed an incident on 21 March, when she filmed security officers awaiting instructions during a tense situation in the session hall and the footage was released on Armlur.am. The second arose, according to the staff notice, from her performing professional duties outside the place reserved for media representatives and pursuing a member of parliament with questions without his consent. A joint statement by Armenian journalistic organisations recalled the Information Disputes Council's conclusion on the first incident: the regulation governing journalists' activities in parliament contained multiple uncertainties and unreasonable requirements, and their application had led to an unlawful and disproportionate restriction of Zhoghovurd's right to disseminate information and ideas. Manukyan had in fact been stripped of accreditation once before, after an argument with a senior ruling-party deputy who accused her newspaper of corruption; a Yerevan court restored her access to parliament in 2024.

Removal from Parliament and Abuse Cases

The conflict escalated further in 2025. Two Zhoghovurd journalists, Knar Manukian and Sona Grigorian, had been banned from the National Assembly after attempting to interview a senior pro-government lawmaker, Hayk Konjorian, about a property deal that raised questions about government corruption; Konjorian refused to answer and complained that they had approached him in an unauthorised area, and the chief of staff revoked their credentials. Entering the building on a one-day pass provided by an opposition lawmaker to cover a meeting of the defence and security committee, they were confronted by the chief of staff, and amid a shouting match with parliamentary correspondents, security guards used force to remove the two women from the building. The parliament speaker defended the expulsion. The journalists stated their intention to challenge the ban in court. Separately, in October 2024, the Coalition for Women in Journalism condemned verbal abuse directed at Manukyan by MP Hovik Aghazaryan, who had attacked her in degrading terms after dissatisfaction with an interview she published, and called on him to apologise publicly. Together, these episodes have made Zhoghovurd's treatment a recurring item in international reporting on the working conditions of journalists in Armenia.

Print and Digital Publishing

Zhoghovurd publishes in print in Yerevan and online through Armlur.am, which functions as a full news website carrying the daily's reporting, video material such as the parliament footage at the centre of the accreditation dispute, and its unsigned editorials. The dual identity, a print daily whose website has its own brand name, is common among Armenian newspapers of its generation and can confuse outside readers; monitors and press-freedom organisations resolve it by treating Zhoghovurd and Armlur.am as one outlet. The newspaper publishes in Armenian, addressing the domestic Armenian-reading audience.

Place in Armenian Media and Limits of the Record

Reliable public information about Zhoghovurd's circulation, staffing levels, finances and detailed founding circumstances is not available in the sources used for this profile, and no figures are offered here rather than invented. What the record does establish is substantial: a Yerevan daily founded around 2011, edited by Knar Manukyan, practising a classical unsigned editorial, which has won a landmark source-protection case in Armenia's highest court and has been at the centre of the country's most visible recent disputes over journalists' access to parliament. In a small media market, that combination of editorial distinctiveness and legal significance gives Zhoghovurd a weight beyond its measurable size.

Assessment

Zhoghovurd represents a particular idea of what a newspaper should be: an institution that speaks in its own name, protects its sources through the courts, and insists on its right to question legislators in the building where they work. Its history since 2019 reads as a sequence of tests of those principles, some won outright, as in the Court of Cassation ruling of 2020, and some still contested, as in the accreditation and removal disputes. For readers of a media directory, Zhoghovurd is therefore both a working Yerevan daily and one of the clearest current case studies of the boundary between parliamentary authority and press freedom in Armenia.