{"id":6677,"date":"2016-07-07T02:11:21","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T02:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/anush-elbakyan-from-childrens-contest-to-emmys\/"},"modified":"2020-07-21T21:11:19","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T21:11:19","slug":"anush-elbakyan-from-childrens-contest-to-emmys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/hay\/2016\/07\/07\/6677\/","title":{"rendered":"Anush Elbakyan: From Children\u2019s Contest to Emmys"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early June, when Aravot.am reported<\/a> that a news video produced by Anush Elbakyan, 25, of the Boston Globe<\/em> had won an Emmy Award, many other local Armenian journalists like me probably began rummaging the webpages of the Boston Globe<\/em> and searching her name online.<\/p>\n

That I would eventually find and connect with Anush, I had no doubt. But it was quite unexpected that the woman firmly entrenched in American journalism who left Armenia with her family when she was 10 years old would respond to the questions I sent in English\u2026 in Armenian.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI obligatorily speak in my mother tongue. From a young age, when my parents\u2019 friends, especially writers, would gather in our house, I heard good, proper Armenian from them and my parents. Unfortunately, I don\u2019t use it now as much as I\u2019d like, but I speak it and try to keep the purity of the language.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anush Elbakyan<\/a> is a multimedia journalist. She is currently a Senior Video Editor with the Boston Globe<\/em>: she manages the video production department and coordinates the daily video news operations. She is also the executive producer and publisher of a few political, as well as food video series.<\/p>\n

Elbakyan won the Boston\/New England Emmy this year in the Outstanding News Report \u2014 Serious Feature category for \u201cA Day in the Life of Leo<\/a>,\u201d a video news story she and senior producer Taylor Delench produced for the Boston Globe<\/em> in 2015.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s voice is notably absent in the approximately five-and-a-half minute short documentary: only in two places do captions briefly communicate that four-year-old Leo came with his young caregiver Alex from Burundi to Boston in 2014 to undergo surgery, and that after the surgeries Leo and Alex will return to Burundi to their separate homes.<\/p>\n

The story of Leo receiving severe burns from a fire when he was two and the subsequent feelings are completely described by the simple, human, but profound dialogue between the boy and his caregiver, in between which Alex also describes for the audience that \u201cthe fire didn\u2019t burn the boy\u2019s \u2018I\u2019,\u201d that Leo is the same person he was before.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Anush believes there are common problems behind the main challenges of professional video journalism.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe world now moves to a frantic rhythm. This refers to absolutely all areas of our lives, including video journalism. People now don\u2019t want to spend their valuable time on long, hollow, unverified and unimportant news, especially since there\u2019s greater choice in receiving the news \u2014 from social networking sites to traditional newspapers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So she considers in this sector delivering \u201cshort, succinct, and absolutely accurate journalism in an interesting way\u201d is the only way out.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhile video journalism, in my opinion, simply has to adhere to human values and most importantly, be interesting. In all times, [but] especially now, this is what\u2019s valued, what\u2019s watched.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I had sent only three questions to Anush by email not to deter her from the start because I know that journalists like to ask questions, but they avoid any opportunity to answer questions. I confess that, on the other hand, I hoped deep down that my request to describe recollections from her childhood would elicit such a capacious response that it would become a large and independent piece in my article. I was mistaken: her response was reserved, modest, and taciturn.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe warmest memories connect me to Armenia and my childhood. It\u2019s my school, our yard, my friends and relatives. It\u2019s hard to isolate any single incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cI now remember with a smile how I sang with a fever of 40 degrees <\/em>in the children\u2019s Silver Key contest in Yerevan, and I can\u2019t forget my performance in Moscow\u2019s huge hall. I was invited to the Morning Star TV show to participate from Armenia. I sang in Armenian, and my performance was very warmly received.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Anush<\/p>\n

I can assume why Anush is so brief and succinct in her answers: she is in essence a 21st century American journalist. If you managed to watch even only \u201cA Day in the Life of Leo,\u201d then you saw that she placed a small child\u2019s entire history in a short duration, with all its layers, and there\u2019s absolutely no textual interference. Approximately like so: it\u2019s better that my subjects and the scenes speak instead of me.<\/p>\n

A recently published study found that American consumers prefer video news more than the Europeans. The authors of the recently published 2016 Reuters Digital News Report<\/em> found<\/a> that in developed countries, in general, news consumers don\u2019t always watch the videos accompanying news stories, but video news consumption was highest in the US.<\/p>\n

So that news is consumed in any country in the world, professional journalism doesn\u2019t like verbosity, and the more apt, important, and interesting information you can insert in a small volume, the higher your mastery.<\/p>\n

And here is another one<\/a> of Anush Elbakyan\u2019s recent video news stories: after the shooting at an Orlando nightclub \u2014 with an infographic of data on gun violence in the US and this short message: \u201cThis nation cannot be a hostage to fear, and we can make it stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruzanna Khachatrian <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early June, when Aravot.am reported that a news video produced by Anush Elbakyan, 25, of the Boston Globe had won an Emmy Award, many other local Armenian journalists like me probably began rummaging the webpages of the Boston Globe and searching her name online. That I would eventually find and connect with Anush, I Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hay","category-newsroom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23279,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677\/revisions\/23279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}