{"id":6731,"date":"2016-07-19T01:50:35","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T01:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/city-was-up-early-but-media-was-a-little-late\/"},"modified":"2016-07-19T01:50:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T01:50:35","slug":"city-was-up-early-but-media-was-a-little-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/critique\/2016\/07\/19\/6731\/","title":{"rendered":"City Was Up Early, But Media Was a Little Late"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

TV stations \u201cwoke up\u201d the latest<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

During the Communists\u2019 time, the news wasn\u2019t news. But the advantage was that people were used to the system of conventions, and for example, if television began to suddenly play symphonic music, people knew that something out of the ordinary had happened. In our times, we consider that there are no conventions, and if something unusual happened, we would first surf the local TV channels (don\u2019t say it\u2019s the internet era; witness the public polls<\/a> conducted after the four-day war in April this year).<\/p>\n

Armenian television coverage of the early morning July 17 armed attack and hostage takeover of a police station in the Yerevan district of Erebuni began about eight hours after the incident. It\u2019s understandable: it was a Sunday, it\u2019s summer, we all wake up late on days like this, sometimes we\u2019re not in Yerevan, and television airwaves are more complex\u2026 If that\u2019s so, thenhow did TV and radio companies succeed in being organized so quickly the night of April 1\u20132, when heavy fighting had occurred at the border?<\/p>\n

Even by the afternoon of July 17, cartoons, soap operas and concert performances were still being aired on Armenian television. Shant TV was the first to break the media silence with a special broadcast at 1:45 pm; 15 minutes later, it was joined by Armenia TV and h2, and half an hour later, also by Yerkir Media. Unlike the other TV stations, Yerkir Media, in any case, had begun to cover the breaking news much earlier, and entered the airwaves with its own, first-hand information. The rest were more cautious: offering purely official information, while online media had long ago disseminated the statements offered as news received \u201cshortly before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Official media were silent<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the early dawn, numerous military police vehicles with their sirens blaring regularly sped along particular streets of the capital (including its center, Kentron). Though symphonic music is more pleasant to the public\u2019s ear, approximately until 9 am in many parts of the city residents received news only on the principle of convention \u2014 from the sound of the police vehicles. Something bad is happening.<\/p>\n

From dawn, I began to rummage through the relevant state agencies\u2019 online news. The last news on the police\u2019s official website was from the day before, with the admonishment to wear seatbelts, which after the afternoon of July 18 is still the latest news on the site. It\u2019s the same on the defense ministry\u2019s official website. The last news on the president\u2019s website, until the evening of July 17, was likewise from the day before, about the president going to visit Karabakh. Old news were also on the National Security Service website, until the hours prior to noon, after which this agency began to upload statements, though not frequently.<\/p>\n

\n

The first<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first information about the incident was disseminated by online news sites, mainly those of newspapers.<\/p>\n

Compared to TV and radio, they \u201cawoke\u201d much earlier: 3\u20134 hours after the incident. Though the first news they spread were the armed groups statements in full.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always this problem in Armenian media\u2019s daily newsfeed: to disseminate official press releases and various groups\u2019 statements verbatim and not prepare professional news stories from them. The first consequence is that you are acting not as a media outlet, but your media outlet becomes identified with those who wrote the text.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t yet 10 am, when the information vacuum was reinforced with the temporary shutdown of Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

The leaders in live broadcasting were Azatutyun and A1+<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first to offer live broadcasting was Azatutyun [RFE\/RL\u2019s Armenian service] and with several working online website, as well as A1+ who followed them, began to some extent meet at least the online audience\u2019s information news demand.<\/p>\n

There are always shortcomings during coverage of developing events. And any media outlet in its daily work does something akin to working out \u2014 unwittingly preparing to become very quickly organized during breaking news events.<\/p>\n

But minor flaws that it could also not have, Azatutyun had. The correspondent and camera operator reporting from the Sari Tagh bridge, of course, during difficult moments left a good impression of working correctly, fulfilling their professional duties as much as possible till the end (when police officials were urging to leave the roof of the building). But during the day, the long \u201csilences\u201d during the live broadcasting, with the mundane speech and conversation of those gathered, I think wasn\u2019t quite the result of organized work (there were no captions in the livestream videos that what is depicted is no longer live and when it happened).<\/p>\n

The work of the newsroom supporting those working at the scene, which should\u2019ve prepared background, and old but important information related to the topic for its colleagues working on air, wasn\u2019t seen.<\/p>\n

A news camera is neither a \u201cbug\u201d [covert listening device] nor a security camera: if nothing happens, the broadcast can be shut off and any significant story about the event can be repeated, being ready to go live in case of any development.<\/p>\n

\n

Regular mistakes, such as exist in everyday broadcasting<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Working from the principle of \u201cif I know, then everyone knows\u201d is not right for a journalist and media outlet. On July 17, during those hours when there were practically no actual developments, it wouldn\u2019t hurt to tell the public who carried out the armed attack and so on. I\u2019m not saying glorify or, the opposite, demolish them. There are so many confirmed facts in their biographies with which you could easily fill the announcer pauses in the live broadcasting, and, on the other hand, inform the audience.<\/p>\n

I heard an example of \u201cif I know, then everyone knows\u201d in a live reportage from Yerevan\u2019s Liberty Square. The reporter was saying what was done to Andreas Ghukasyan and Shahen Harutyunyan. But who are they? I, the most informed consumer, didn\u2019t know \u2014 shouldn\u2019t it have been said in two words who they were?<\/p>\n

Another repeated linguistic\/semantic mistake: a captive is not a hostage, and a hostage is not a captive.<\/p>\n

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

TV stations \u201cwoke up\u201d the latest During the Communists\u2019 time, the news wasn\u2019t news. But the advantage was that people were used to the system of conventions, and for example, if television began to suddenly play symphonic music, people knew that something out of the ordinary had happened. In our times, we consider that there Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6731","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=6731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}