Wordpress for Journalists

PS: I didn't know WSJ and CNN are on Wordpress. Wow!

Six essential digital publishing tools for journalists

iReport Armenia: gamification to mobilize citizen reporters

Բլոգինգի 15 ոճեր. ուսումնական նյութ

Այստեղ կարող եք դիտել Արթուր Պապյանի մյուս ուսումնական նյութերը։

My humble 'interpersona' on Interactive

I was guest to Banadzev company's Interactive show dedicated to technology and new media this Saturday. As I don't treat my blogging activity very seriously, my appearance on Interactive was less than serious too :))

Facebook and Twitter Are Changing the Middle East

In an interview with WSJ's Alan Murray, social media expert Clay Shirky discusses the effect of Facebook, Twitter and other social media in the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and what it could mean for the Middle East at large.

Խորհուրդներ սկսնակ լուսանկարիչներին

View more presentations from Artur Papyan.

Ինտերնետային տեքստի առանձնահատկությունները

View more presentations from Artur Papyan.

Yerevan's Mayor Gagik Beglarian Resigns and Quits Blogging

Gagik Beglarian's blog before closure

Following his scandalous resignation over beating a presidential aide, Yerevan's Mayor Gagik Beglarian has closed his blog, which was opened last year ahead of May 2009 municipal elections in Yerevan which had ensured his position as mayor for 4 years.

Read more »

What is New Media for Armenian journalists and bloggers

Wordpress Celebrates 1 Million Mobile Users

Wordpress, one of the world's largest blogging services (maybe the largest after partnering with Microsoft Live Spaces) has just passed 1 million mobile users mark across all platforms. 

Read more »

Armenia Needs Serzh Sargsyan Twitter Account

Twitter saw 300% growth in sign-ups the next day and have seen steady growth in activity and high-profile Russian use one day after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev started an account at Twitter HQ.
Read more »

Thoughts on recent transformations of Armenian blogosphere

The growing influence of social networks, especially Facebook, has triggered discussions around the future of the Armenian blogosphere.
Read more »

UK's blogging Ambassador and VIP blogging in Armenia

Charles Lonsdale, British Ambassador to Armenia has started a blog, which he hopes to use to write about what the Embassy does, as well as "about some of the issues we don’t get to talk about so much in the media."
Read more »

Russia: ideology becomes a mash-up

Evgeny Morozov, 5 - 08 - 2008
Originally published at: Opendemocracy.net

Solzhenitsyn's death triggered a battle on the Internet as bloggers rushed to accuse, dismiss him or defend him. The Kremlin has found a powerful propaganda machine for its brand of ambiguous authoritarianism, argues Evgeny Morozov

One of the first cartoons to travel across the Russian blogosphere on the day of Solzhenitsyn's death depicts the famed writer swirling in a dirty Soviet toilet. Next to him hangs a roll of toilet paper made of US dollars. "The first circle" reads the caption, alluding to his eponymous novel.

Anti-Solzhenitsyn comments accompany posts featuring the cartoon, click here for Russian: "Thanks all! We've done it: almost all the time our opinion's been getting more clicks than the chorus of tearful praise-mongering for Solzhenitsyn organised by the remaining liberals and hard-core Putinists..When a vicious dog dies, the whole street rejoices - isn't that what you'd expect?)"

The cartoon and the Solzhenitsyn-bashing that followed it easily became one of the most discussed posts on the Russian Internet that day; pro-Solzhenitsyn bloggers launched their own campaign to clear his name of accusations. Thousands of comments followed, in what may seem like a great exercise in online deliberation.

Under closer scrutiny, however, most of those comments reveal a nation that is still at pains to define itself. As Russians ponder the complex fate of their controversial writer-and their long history of authoritarianism, they still prefer to oversimplify their past rather than acknowledge it in full.

Did Solzhenitsyn collaborate with the authorities? Did he spy on his camp-mates? Was he on CIA's payroll? Did he sympathize with the Nazis? Is he to blame for the fall of the Soviet system? Did he have any moral right to tell the country what to do, given his own possibly tainted experience in the camps?

Those are all complex questions in need of well-researched and well-considered answers; the thousands of comments on Russian blogs produced very few satisfactory candidates. But not because the commentators haven't tried - they did - but simply because online polemics rarely produce new factual evidence.

The problem with 'citizen history'

The internet may have given us the infinite world of hyperlinks but only at the cost of well-documented footnotes, which regularly fall through the infinite cracks of online conversations. Yet history without footnotes is a mere black-and-white parody of itself; it's a history without subtlety, great for propaganda but useless for serious inquiry.

Yet this may be precisely the kind of therapeutic story-telling that Russians have longed for, as it's only by embracing such do-it-yourself history that they can heal the great traumas of their past. Internet has offered them a good remedy, opening a new-digital- chapter in 'revision studies' of the Soviet and the post-Soviet histories. As the debates surrounding Solzhenitsyn's legacy reveal, many Russians have taken their online historical quests well too seriously.

Armed with Google and its Russian alternatives, these 'citizen historians' fear no history, as they adopt a purely quantitative approach to it. They wrongly believe that truth belongs to those who find more facts, as it's usually the quantity of arguments - not their quality - that determines the outcome of most online discussions they engage in. And so they jump over to re-visit archives, re-read books, re-scan documents and proudly flaunt their historical trophies-many of them fake-in online discussions. 'I have 10 hyperlinks against your 9. I win. History is over'.

In the blogosphere, arguments never end, they only acquire new hyperlinks. To win in most battles that take place in the Russian cyberspace, one simply needs to have access to a bottomless reservoir of statistics and a mastery of italicised fonts: how many people really died in Ukraine's Holodomor, how many wars the US really started, how many Albanians really disappeared in Kosovo, how much money the Yeltsin government really wasted. Maps, budgets, photos, scanned pages of the original manuscripts - it's all out there at your disposal, to help you cook the greatest historical soup of all times: your customized version of world history, downloadable directly to your shiny iPod.

Ambiguous authoritarianism

While each of these 'citizen historians' may have an audience of fewer than five followers, the network effect makes this peer-to-peer revisionism more influential and disruptive that it appears at first sight. Russia's ruling elites took note of this early on - and suddenly their own methods have become much more subtle-even cryptic at times-especially viewed against the naïve brutality of Putin's early years.

In fact, the best label for today's Russian regime, where everything seems to have a latent dimension, is 'ambiguous authoritarianism'. Even Yeltsin's rule, by comparison, seems very predictable: the old man was quirky but the vector of his policies was at least discernible. Today it's not even clear who is in charge; who is to blame - even less so.

This only ratchets up the sense of fear and paranoia among the low-ranking bureaucrats. Some of them simply break down under the great pressure of endless and perverse experiments in game theory that policy-making in today's Russia entails. What would Putin say if Medvedev responds in this particular way? How would Medvedev react if Putin doesn't respond? What if both of them respond? Five more years of such ambiguity and all of Russia's best pundits, journalists, and policy-makers would just capitulate and retreat to their dachas, unable to predict anything meaningful.

This tyranny of ambivalence also explains why Kremlin back-pedalled on the creation of the official state ideology; ideology provides easy answers and this is not how this regime advances its dominance. It would rather terrorise everyone by uncertainty than state its real position on issues as plain and simple as the necessity of more foreign direct investment.

This dismantling of ideology couldn't pass unnoticed. Thus, what started as a very enthusiastic and public effort to revise much of the Soviet and post-Soviet history - the debates over the national anthem may have been the highlight of that campaign - gradually faded away. The last big statement on the subject - Putin's characterisation of the fall of the USSR as 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of all times' -- dates back to 2005. Even Kremlin's attempts to build a youth movement, Nashi, are on hold now; it didn't produce a generation of apparatchiks because it couldn't do so without a coherent ideology.

Instead, the Kremlin opted for a DIY ideology. Today the base of its supporters could be equally pro-US and anti-US, pro-Stalin and anti-Stalin, pro-USSR and anti-USSR, pro-FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) and anti-FD; this club clearly has an open-door policy. That the state doesn't officially preclude anyone from being part of it explains its popularity; it is ambivalent enough to allow its supporters define their own relation to power in terms of their historical and geopolitical concerns. Russian citizens might eventually click their way to the heart of the matter and discover that their options are actually quite limited, but this is not going to happen anytime soon - particularly with so many pressing online battles for them to engage in.

Nano-propaganda

For now, they fancy themselves as the great investigators of history, confronting the big questions that the state expects them to answer. Was Stalin good? Was Solzhenitsyn good? Was Gorbachev good? Is Europe an enemy? Is China a friend? Those questions produce thousands of online spats on a daily basis, gradually shifting the public consensus to more extreme positions, hyperlink by hyperlink.

Of course, most of those questions are so ultra-sensitive that Kremlin itself wouldn't even attempt to answer them; even having Putin or Medvedev ask them in public might have dire social consequences. So the country's leaders have simply outsourced all this trenchant Q&A warfare to the masses; after all, they have the Internet to test the boundaries of what is publicly acceptable.

User-generated ideology was probably the only shot that the authorities ever had at doing something about the ideological vacuum that was expanding exponentially halfway into Putin's first term- and they used it well. Such a move was badly needed to counter the falling public trust in traditional channels of spreading Kremlin's gospel. So instead they turned to nano-propaganda on the Web: rationed in small portions, to just a few dozen people, and normally through their peers.

The Kremlin has learned a great deal from marketers; now they know how to plant messages with a few hardcore supporters - and wait while they propagate through the new networked public sphere. From there, the messages can travel on their own. True, the rulers may need to subsidise some of the early supporters for a short period - hence rampant speculations about possible Kremlin-funded groups that leave comments on blogs and forums, the so-called 'G Squad' - but a few of them are enough to create an army of unpaid and very trustworthy believers in the cause.

This is how the modern Russian ideology became the ultimate mash-up: Stalin's strong-hand leadership, Solzhenitsyn's patriotism, Putin's spy-past, Yeltsin's irrationality - they are all part of this new private Lego-ideology, which the Kremlin wants the public to construct in their heads. Everyone can have their own copy; just be creative in using Google. Of course, Kremlin has a sketch of the answers it wants to hear; it's only the insignificant details that are up for grabs. Everyone ends up building the same Lego-like catafalque; it's only the colours that differ.

...In response to the odious Solzhenitsyn cartoon, one commentator recounted the old joke about what Russian encyclopedias would say about Brezhnev in 2080. Not much: only that he was a petty bureaucrat and a contemporary to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. But this is a very optimistic view of the future. The recent Names of Russia contest - where Russians are asked to cast votes on the most significant Russians of all times - suggest a different scenario.

Names of Russia is a full-blown attempt to revise much of recent history by relying on public efforts alone. That the state opened it up for voting shows its confidence in its methods. After all, Yeltsin or Gorbachev might win the poll. Names of Russia may be Kremlin's first successful attempt to crowd-source revisionism; not surprisingly, Stalin is currently ranked #2 and Lenin #4. Forget updating textbook editions-- this is messy, expensive, and takes time. It's much easier to unleash the creativity of millions into 'verifying' facts, most of which don't really need much verification. What else can explain an army of Russian teenagers trying to out-compete each other in their fact-finding quests to whitewash Stalin and his heroism during the war and share their findings with their peers on LiveJournal (never mind that Stalin was Georgian, not Russian).

The Kremlin's larger objective in all of this is also beginning to emerge: they want the public to accept the ideology of communism - only without communism. 'The USSR would have been perfect but for the Communist Party' is Moscow's new logic. It's this very logic that makes Stalin the top Russian of all times: if you throw out the communism and labour camps, he was a great leader. Sometime in the middle of Putin's presidency, Kremlin understood that they wouldn't be able to reconcile the irreconcilable and foist this very controversial set of dubious truths on the masses; the public had to embrace this new great logic by themselves, peacefully and anonymously. So off went the ideology - and in came the Internet.

That Russians have finally started to confront their history matters a great deal. However, the vector of that confrontation - as well as the motivation behind it - matter even more. So far this tainted flirtation with history doesn't promise anything good for Russia and its neighbours; that the state has found a powerful propaganda machine in the new media only makes it more dangerous.

The Armenian media landscape in the pretext of Parliamentary Elections; What is The Armenian Blogosphere? New Media vs. Old Media...

As the authoritarian control of traditional media intensifies in the context of the upcoming parliamentary elections, the blogs have an opportunity of filling in the vacuum of providing an “alternative viewpoint” and thus appealing to larger masses of readership. The situation, like always, is not that simple however. Although considerable progress was observed in the Armenian blogosphere during the past year, the blogs remain a niche type of media and with just a couple of exceptions, play no role whatsoever in formulating news agenda and participating in the democratic discourse in the country.

In the meanwhile, the incumbent authorities in Armenia are persistently pressurizing the traditional media, using a combination of hidden economic incentives and tax/legal pressures. The latest point can be illustrated by looking at the ownership and financing patterns of most media outlets in Armenia (some examples: Kentron TV owned by Gaguik Tsarukyan, AR TV by Hrant Vardanyan, H2 TV by Samvel Mayrapetyan), while contrasting that with recent cases against Arman Babajanyan editor of very oppositional newspaper and the newly imposed annual fee for servicing the broadcast frequency brought against Radio Companies, who enjoy a relative degree of economic freedom).

On January 23, at the plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of January 22-26 in Strasbourg, the Resolution 1532 (2007) on Armenia's honoring of obligations and commitments to CE was adopted, in which PACE stated (“The Assembly expects Armenia to demonstrate its capacity to hold the parliamentary elections in 2007 and the presidential elections in 2008 in accordance with international standards, not least with regard to pluralist, impartial media coverage of the election campaign,”) the importance of holding free and fair parliamentary elections in 2007, presidential elections in 2008, and stressed the importance of ensuring pluralist, impartial media coverage of the election campaign. Further on clause 6.2 of the Resolution notes that “a few months away from forthcoming parliamentary elections, the Assembly attaches special importance to pluralism of the electronic media”, since “equitable access by all political parties” to them is “an absolute prerequisite for the holding of free and fair elections”. On the same note Anthony Godfrey, U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Armenia who "warned today[on January 23rd] in Yerevan that his government would revise the decision to allocate a hefty $236 million in extra aid to Armenia if its authorities fail to hold free and just parliamentary elections, slated for May".

A number of widely recognized organizations have recently posted reports on the state of freedom and democracy in Armenia, in which the country repeatedly ranks among partly free, oppressive towards journalists, etc. (See reports by: Freedom House; Reporters without Borders; Global Integrity).The following conclusion of the Freedom House is especially worth mentioning: “Systematic efforts to control media in countries of the former Soviet Union have intensified in 2006 indicating further erosion of civil liberties.”

In the light of all of the above, it is especially important to observe the development of a new type of media: Blogging in Armenia. The number of well established and regularly updated blogs is more then 30 at this point (see the Armenian blogs list on the right side of this web page for some links), which means that there are more blogs, then there are websites for all other media outlets in the Armenian internet, counting newspapers, news agencies, radios, TV company websites taken together. Unlike the traditional media, blogging operates on the principles of independence, voluntary contribution, and anonymity if necessary, which renders a degree of protection to the authors. It is a form of publishing which is harder to control, and hence at this moment there are no widely recognized blogs in Armenia obviously controlled either by the government or by any other political force.

It is important to note, that according to the report made on December 19, 2006 by International Telecommunication Union the total number of internet users in Armenia makes up 150,000 people and the number is growing (Armenpress, Decembe 19 newsroll). Although a very small percentage of these 150,000 uses internet as their prime source of information (I couldn’t find any statistics, but my most optimistic estimate doesn’t exceed 5%), the online media as a whole have a huge potential readership, which is several times bigger then the circulation of the biggest printed Armenian newspaper (most print newspapers have an average "tirage" of 1000-2500 (don't confuse "tirage" - number of published units with circulation, as circulation in the case of Armenian newspapers is actually much lower then their "number of published copies"), while the biggest newspapers like: Aravot, Haykakan Zhamanak printa little more then 5000 copies daily).

One of the important characteristics of the online media is also its “on-demand” nature, which means, that when there are important events happening the use of online media increases dramatically. To make justice to the traditional media we have to note, that the last feature is obvious for them as well, but for the bloggers the growth is incremental. The example of Armenian writer, journalist Hrant Dink’s murder should be considered here. On the day of Dink’s murder and the days immediately following it the usage of blogs and online newspapers in Armenia doubled and tripled in many cases. This means, that when people are really looking for information they turn to the internet. It was also important to note, that people who had something to say about the tragedy preferred to go to the blogs, as they had the possibility of instantly commenting on the issue, whereas the traditional newspapers do not provide them with such possibilities. They do provide the possibility of writing “letters to editor” type of interaction, but it is clearly not as popular as the commenting feature of blogs and forums.

The following figures are a comparison of blogs vs. traditional media websites in the Armenian internet. The most popular English Language Armenian blog: Oneworld Multimedia for example gets 500 page-views per day at times; while most other English language blogs don’t get more then 50-80 page views per day. This does not include the pages/articles viewed using RSS/Atom XML feeds, which seriously decreases the actual number of page views of the blogs. The situation is rather different in the Russian language Armenian blogs, because they are based on LiveJournal, which enables the users to view other people's blogs inline at their own blog, using the Friends feature, so tracking actual page views is even more problematic.

Although the following comparison is not really compatible, because the concepts of pageviews and visitors are vastly different, the following figures could be looked at: Armenian Rating System Circle.am the most popular Armenian online media: A1plus gets 1700 visits per day on average; ArmeniaNow gets 600 visits on averageand Panorama.am barely passes the 400 ma on average.

Having said all of the above, I seem to have more questions, then answers. So here are some questions for discussion (although my page doesn't really have visitors, so expecting a discussion would be silly, wouldn't it?):

1. What do the bloggers see as their function in the Armenian media landscape? (Perhaps they see no function at all?)

2. What are the potentials for blogging to become an alternative channel for communication and public dialogue? (At this point looks like there are none!)

3. What are obstacles for the development of blogging? (expensive and low quality internet? No money via the Google Adwords?)

4. Why am I asking all this stupid questions? J (‘cause I’m looking for solutions, you see!)