Armenian Journalism Antics

NOTE: Yes, I know Armenia technically isn't in Eastern Europe -- but it's not too far, and it's far enough away to be of interest to most of you, I think. I'll be posting once or twice more about the Caucasas region before I arrive in Budapest on Sept. 8-9. Enjoy!

YEREVAN, Armenia – If I showed you the following two sample leads, which one would you think was better?

The political situation in Armenia is in a crisis and is crashing down.

or

Nearly all of 100 Armenians surveyed on Yerevan’s streets yesterday said they planned to vote, but that they did not feel optimistic about politicians being able to solve the country’s many social and economic problems.

Most likely, you’d select the second answer: it’s succinct, clear, based on factual information and data research. But if you were in the group of 13 Armenian reporters who took a workshop with me last week, the response was different.

“The first lead is very dramatic, and very concrete,” says one junior reporter. About half the room agrees with her. Another one grumbles “both are bad.” The other half recognize the second lead contains more information, but they don’t like how it reads.

“No!” they shout, when I point out that the first lead is lacking in fact, is depressing, is vague and unclear and could be used to start just about any story in Armenia these days. “That’s how we feel about the second one.”

Welcome to the whacky field of journalism training. It’s unexpected, and a bit … well, it’s definitely a meeting of two different worlds. The biggest thing I’ve had the learn, in the eight-plus years that I’ve done this work, is to expect that this very argument will be made to me, no matter where I go in the former Soviet Union.

The trick is learning how to talk to people from across this divide, journalism professionals from a different world, and still be able to respect each other.
**

“No,” says my teacher, as I pick up a piece of charcoal, before I even lay a mark on the paper. “No,” he says again, as I, hesitantly, lower it a little. Then “No!” again, he takes the charcoal from my hand, impatient, and marks my paper himself. “Start here,” he says sternly, then walks away.

For perhaps the fifth or sixth time, I feel like a complete and total idiot, in front of a whole class of people who can draw better than I.

At 33, I was a successful journalist who was routinely flown around the world to train journalists in various countries in the former Soviet Union. Then I decided to become a painter. All of a sudden, after being a teacher and a so-called “expert” – a word I chafed at, but accepted – I was a beginner, and my ego didn’t take to it well.

Unlike most artists, I hadn’t spent my life drawing. My friend Carrie took me to an open studio figure drawing session, where I nervously started sketching nude men and women, worried that someone would call me out as a fraud. When nobody did, I kept going. But I soon knew that I had hit a limit in my ability to see, or perceive the objects in front of me. I needed to learn how to draw, so I began enrolling in classes.

My first proper beginning drawing class came this past winter. The teacher, named Yi Liang (pronounced “Ee lee-ang”) was Chinese, classically trained, a brilliant draftsman, and a fairly gentle soul. He was modest about his English – which was good enough – and humble about his work -- which was, quite frankly, incredible. He was exacting and demanded a lot from his students, just as I'm sure he'd been challenged at one of China's premiere art schools.

At first, I enjoyed the challenge, but quickly got in over my head. I found the issues of perspective particularly tricky, and my gentle teacher began to get impatient with me. First he would try to correct, but then, he began to consistently cut down my work. I miserably continued to try, and just as miserably, I continued to fail. I could tell Yi didn’t know what to do with me.

The more self-conscious I got, the more irritated my teacher would get, until, during the last class, the word “No” came out so many times that I was convinced I was a complete failure. I psychologically got smaller and smaller in the class, until I felt like absolutely nothing.

**

Lida was by far the oldest Armenian journalist in the group of reporters facing me a week ago. She’s been an editor of a regional newspaper for 30 years, and she writes and thinks in the old Soviet way. I know it well, because I’ve worked with her before. When I held a photo in front of her four years ago at a previous workshop and asked her for a fact about it she scrutinized it closely and came up with the following:

“It’s a picture of a man planting flowers in front of a skyscraper,” she began. “So the fact is that the man works for the city and he is proud of doing his job.”

I could not, at the time, convince her or any of her colleagues that what she’d stated wasn’t a fact, it was an assumption. In the soviet journalism world, people wrote what they were told to write, regardless of whether it was true or not. They wrote in a way to raise national pride. And they were actively discouraged from collecting information through independent observation. Even the fact that she was wrong about the photo didn’t perturb her: she knew what she saw in her own city, alright. “We know it, we know it,” she and her colleagues said.

But this time the situation for Lida is different.

Lida is the only reporter who has worked in the room during the soviet era: everyone else has been working for independent newspapers and news agencies for between two and ten years, on average – well after the soviets left. They ask more questions, they are more likely to look up voting records of their various politicians, they don’t want to portray everything perfectly. I watch Lida as Lida watches them, with a mixture of both interest and puzzlement.

The subject of this workshop is how to conduct and write about a straw poll – that is, a poll that isn’t statistically significant, but can help reporters guage how people might be feeling about a particular issue.

Our issue is parliamentary elections, which will happen next May. Because previous elections have been so corrupt and poorly managed, and there is virtually no opposition group ready to challenge the current leaders, we suspect – we assume -- people will be fairly cynical. We decide to design a set of questions checking voter attitudes towards their parliamentarian in particular, towards the government in general, and whether they plan to vote, and whether they’ve ever been offered a bribe for their vote.

Each journalist is assigned to a different neighborhood, and required to get 20 interviews, so we’ll have at least 200 respondents. Lida arrives back to the air-conditioned hotel a little before the rest of us, still panting from the 102-degree heat.

“I’ve never done anything like that,” she says. And she, unlike all the other reporters, stays with us for three more hours to help tally up the survey results. Maybe it's the air conditioning. Or maybe, for the first time, she wasn't sure what the results would show, and she wanted to see it.

**

In the spring, I signed up for another drawing class – this time, drawing the figure. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d suck again, and that I’d try to get out of it what I could. I even announced this to the group, when we made our introductions. Hi. I’ll be the worst student in the class.

But Mike, the American teacher, made it clear immediately things would be different from my somber winter quarter.

Mike was, like my teacher, Yi, very exacting. He was also a very good draftsman. But
Mike also knew that adult learners come to things differently than those naturally talented as artists and drawers from a young age. He had taught long enough to see those pitfalls. And while he would be sure to correct something if it wasn’t done right, he never stood behind me or anyone else in the class and said “no.” Mike was very positive, and he thrilled at any little achievement his students made. It was an infectious attitude.

Slowly, I began to unfurl from my tight ball of insecurity. Once, when we’d drawn a figure by pulling light tones out of a darkened paper, I asked Mike what he thought, cringing inside. He took me across the room to look at the drawing.

“What does it look like?” he said.

“It looks like a nude woman sitting on a stool,” I answered.

“Right,” he said. “And because you can see that from this far away, you’ve done a good job.”

When the course ended, I certainly wasn’t the best drawer in the class. But I didn’t care anymore. All I cared about was that I knew more about drawing, and that I wanted to continue to draw. Everything that I’d learned in Yi’s class came back to me, coalescing into something that would help me move forward. I still draw most days. And slowly, slowly, I’m getting better.

**

When I was asked to participate in the survey, I had to run around and talk to 20 people in a short amount of time. I had never done anything like that.

This was the lead to Lida’s news story, which I’d asked her and everyone else to write in class and read for critique. The instruction had been to find the most interesting fact from the survey results and use that in the first sentence of the story, and technically, she’d done just that – the most interesting fact to Lida was that she’d conducted the survey at all. She’d listened to what other people thought, rather than interjecting her own opinion.

I thought of Mike, I thought of Yi, and suddenly I realized we had progress.

“I can see that this is the most interesting thing to you, Lida,” I said. “That’s excellent, and you did follow the directions I gave you.

“But we’ve also got to think that if a thing is important, it’s not just important to us, it’s also important to the readers.”

I asked the other reporters, who had argued so vigorously against the leads I’d presented them, to weigh in. Did they like Lida’s lead? Why or why not?

A resounding set of ‘nos,’ and explanations, followed. Lida sat, nodding thoughtfully, as her colleagues told her it was the information in the survey that was most important to the readers, not that the survey had been done, or some vague generalization about the results. It was fascinating: all of sudden, the very thing they had argued me with at the beginning of class they were now supporting as if it was the best idea on the planet.

So she tried again:

A survey had been conducted with 200 Yerevan residents on the subject of Parliamentary elections on Aug. 16, 2006.

“That’s better,” I said in a private editing session I held with her, “but even more important than that your group conducted the survey, what did you find out?”

Together, we came up with this:

It’s a puzzle of the Armenian mind that 81 percent of people surveyed in Yerevan say they don’t trust the government, yet 70 percent of those same people plan to vote next May.

“Thank you so much, Leah, this was a great workshop!” said Lida, patting my shoulder and smiling at me as if I was one of her grandchildren who’d just done something clever. “I’m going to print this in my paper on Monday.”

Thanks Mike, Thanks Yi, I thought to myself, as she walked away. Thanks for teaching me not not only how to learn, but how to teach.