Around a year ago a PR responsible of one of the ministries, speaking with our journalist, said that he was the head of the PR department and therefore, he didn’t want to speak to ordinary journalists – he should speak only to the heads, i.e. his counterparts and to the editors. This extreme demonstration of bureaucratic arrogance is one of illustrative examples of bad work with mass media. I have encountered another example just lately. Gyumri City Hall press secretary L. Aghekyan wrote a long lyrical letter, in response to our short news, the point of which was the suggestion that “Aravot” welcomes opening “clubs disseminating lust”, despite the fact that he hadn’t read any “welcoming speech” about those “clubs” in our newspaper. Well, those are the two characteristic mistakes I have faced during 17 years of my editorial work for the newspaper.
I myself was the press secretary of the first president of the Republic of Armenia in 1992-94. By the way, regardless of Levon Ter-Petrossian’s nowadays activities, let alone, regardless of what personalities are among his entourage today, I assure you Armenia and Armenians were lucky to have him the head of the country in the first half of 1990s. It didn’t occur to me to look down my nose at any journalist at the time. If I needed to take any material from “Yerkir” newspaper, the most reputed newspaper at the time, I would go to the former “Hayhamerg” building on foot and took the material from my colleague Aghvan Vardanyan. Both then and now, bearing quite different ideologies, we consider each other a colleague and I am convinced it is normal. I had no task of “strongly responding to” the President’s rivals or “catching in a trap” the opposition newspapers during a year and a half of my government service. It would have been funny to seek for enemies inside the country, when the real enemy was attacking your land armed with automatic weapons and armored vehicles. It is obvious that we take a lot of trouble for external propaganda. I wasn’t aware of the “PR technology” expression at the time, because journalism and PR, in my opinion, are incompatible and sometimes opposite phenomena.
Now the times have changed, today the “PR technologies” subject is taught at the universities and the press secretaries have become almost equal to the ministers (at least many of them behave like those). I hope the new generation studying that profession will find the right ways of working with the mass media. Just two pieces of advice as a senior colleague. 1. Write shortly and to the point, forget how the teachers of the Armenian language and literature taught you to write essays at high school. 2. Don’t identify yourselves with your “bosses” – you are just his press secretary and not the transformation of his elevated soul in this transitory life.
