Trajectories

About the project

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 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.

How the journalists are working

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.

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 wanted to explore the question: what do families tell their children about the Nagorny 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.

In over two years, over 100 materials were published. These generated significant interest from wider audiences. These articles were also shared by reputable organizations and local media. The authors themselves actively promoted the stories on their personal social media accounts,  encouraging their friends, relatives and followers to discuss conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts.

Generation Genius

As part of the project JAMNews also engaged a new cohort of young journalists from across the Caucasus through a training programme geared towards video-making. The group of young people produced and published over 70 videos in multiple languages as part of a collective called Generation Genius.

Building strong connections

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. The fact that the editors who were part of the project were willing to continue to work together demonstrated how strong were the relationships they built over years of dialogue, and how efficient such initiatives can be. .

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. 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