Trajectories

Trajectories is a journalistic project aimed at highlighting the human cost of the protracted conflict. Following the second Nagorny Karabakh War it revived dialogue between media professionals, improved trust and understanding between them, and also engaged new journalists and developed their skills in conflict-sensitive journalism.

The project brought together a range of Armenian (led by Public Journalism Club until early 2023) and Azerbaijani journalists and editors to produce various types of digital content: articles, interviews, photos and videos. These were published on the online media platform JAMnews, part of Go Group Media.

Trajectories was based on Unheard Voices, an earlier collaboration with JAMnews that ran from 2016 to 2019, and involved some of the same journalists and editors.

The ethos of the initiative is to provide information from diverse sources to help people from different regions of the Caucasus to get to know each other better. It is important that readers see the content as trustworthy, so the project introduced a two-step approval process for each story. Before getting published, every piece of journalistic work had to first get a green light from editors from each conflicting side. It then went to a third party, the Georgian editorial team, for final checking.

This system left less room for bias, guaranteeing that each story was prepared to a high standard and was free from propaganda or hate speech.

The high interest in these articles can be seen in the number of views and shares they achieved. Some pieces were re-published and shared by some other reputable organisations, and local media portals.

An example of the project’s journalistic achievements is the cooperation between Armenian and Azerbaijani journalists on a 2021 article on children and the Karabakh conflict. Following the hostilities of 2020, the journalists asked young parents in Armenia and Azerbaijan: what do families teach children, and what do they tell them about the Karabakh conflict? They carried out several interviews with parents from both sides, expressing a range of different views. Alongside these, they ran comments from a psychologist on the question of how to stop the transmission of trauma from generation to generation.

However, the achievements of the project went beyond the media outputs.

The launch of the platform was a sensitive issue. Considering the high political tension in the region, it was an achievement to engage new authors and journalists in the project. In the post-war environment, we were very lucky to have any participants willing to engage in dialogue, especially from Armenia, where they were only just starting to deal with the impact of having lost the second Nagorny Karabakh War. The fact that our editors were willing to continue to work together is a testament to the relationships they built over years of dialogue, and the positive work they do in helping individual journalists improve their craft.

Another positive outcome is the wider dissemination of the stories produced and published by the project. This was partly through working with local media and partly because individual journalists were actively sharing their stories through their personal social media accounts. This helped to promote discussions on conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts among their friends, relatives and followers.

In August 2022, project participants met in Podgorica, Montenegro. This was the first joint meeting after the 2020 war and the aim was to encourage Armenian and Azerbaijani authors to discuss possible opportunities for strengthening their collaboration.

Journalists involved in Trajectories commented on the unique chance it gave them to hear the other side’s views. A participant from Armenia said: “meeting colleagues was important for me. It was very important for me to see them face to face, communicate with Azerbaijani journalists cooperating with the project, know who they are, talk to them, get to know them. Of course, there was not enough time to get to know them well, but it was enough to form a preliminary opinion. If such meetings are regular, maybe an atmosphere of mutual trust will be formed between our teams”. Participants from the Azerbaijani side also expressed positive feelings and one of them said that the meeting with the Armenian side was one of the important moments during their work for Trajectories.

Photograph by Gulnar Salimova