The 2007 Parliamentary and 2008 Presidential elections became a period of ordeals for the Armenian media. The global survey on freedom of press of “Freedom House” international organization for 2007, released in late April this year, once again classed Armenian media as not free. The two-point decline of media freedom level in the country was explained by “Freedom House” to be due primarily to “increased government pressure on the media ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections”.
The introduction of state of emergency on March 1-20, 2008 in Yerevan, capital of Armenia was accompanied by preemptive censorship that resulted in a suspension of a number of leading newspapers, blockage of web-sites, known for their critical attitude towards authorities.
Meanwhile, Armenia saw an unprecedented growth of attention and importance of citizen media: blogs, forums, video hosting sites, social networks all came to fill the gap opened up by partial and self-censored traditional media. Especially during the initial days of the state of emergency in March 2008, the new media became the only source of alternative information in Armenia.
The power of new media was recognized by the authorities – with president-elect Serzh Sargsyan approving the creation of a blog on behalf of himself and taking time on Public TV to answer questions received via the blog, and the opposition – who launched a range of pro-opposition blogs throughout the pre-election and post-election periods.
The civil society in Armenia was also quick to pick up on the importance and influence of blogging and citizen media – various aspects of the civil society today are represented and covered in the blogs and social networks– in much better ways, then the traditional media has ever been able to do. There are today environmental blogs, civil action blogs, social groups for pro-democracy campaigners, web resources for Armenian genocide campaigners, for people striving for Karabakh independence, for preservation of Armenian historical monuments around the world, for Armenia’s pro-European or pro-Russian foreign policy orientation. There are a range of initiatives for freedom of speech, open sourcing, professional interests. Most of these new media initiatives, however, exist in isolation. There is much to be gained from sharing knowledge and experience, as well as from introducing modern world trends in new media to these people, who spend so much volunteer time and efforts on creating the new media reality in Armenia. The BarCamp format as described above, appears to be the most suitable for this purpose – hence this concept paper, created by an initiative group of Armenian bloggers and new media specialists, is looking for support to implement a BarCamp Yerevan on April 17-19, 2009.
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