Yeghegnadzor, Armenia (photo by Emily Haas)
Emily Haas, 2008 photojournalism graduate, has been serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia since June 2009. Emily’s primary assignment as an Environmental Education volunteer has been teaching at an Eco-Club for children, but after a year in Armenia she has developed a secondary project that will put her photography and journalism background to use. In the rural southern province of Vayots Dzor, she and her counterpart, Liparit Asatryan, have developed a plan to open a media center. The premise of the project is loosely based on the ideas of the Rural News Network, a class Emily participated in while studying at UM.
As the Vayots Dzor region currently has no media, Emily and Liparit plan to train community members to be citizen journalists. The media center will be housed in Yeghegnadzor, the city Emily lives in, and will eventually reach out to the surrounding communities. Emily and Liparit, along with guest lecturers from around Armenia, will conduct the first trainings for the media center participants. The media center will have a blog that the participants will update regularly with photography, articles, videos and other multimedia. After some time of practice, the trained participants will then conduct peer-to-peer trainings in Vayots Dzor villages and region-wide news will be posted to the blog.
Emily recently collected over $3,300 in donations from friends and family to buy camera, video and audio equipment to be used in the media center. Emily and Liparit are now in the process of registering the project as an NGO, so as to be able to apply for grants and other volunteers in the future. In the coming months, Emily and Liparit will begin trainings with media center participants and posting to the blog.
Emily told me she would be happy to receive more donations of cash or equipment. To give you an idea of what conditions are like, she wrote, “I am learning a lot about the media in Armenia. I guess each regional governor gets a huge chunk of money from the state government for media. If there is no media in the region, then the money is just pocketed. When a community wants something covered, they have to PAY for the news team to come out and do a story. In most cases it is about $150 just for ONE piece of news!! We’ll see how much “western” journalism ethics I can impart on Armenians.” The new governor, she says, “is very open to our ideas and is willing to give us a room in the governor’s building and is in full support of our project. In Armenia, it is all about who you know and a new governor is always a good thing!”
