Ashot Mkhoyan, the coordinator of Aravot’s website in the 1990s, tells the story.
“Aravot was the first newspaper to have a website. Misak Khachatryan and I worked on that website,” Ashot Mkhoyan recalled during a conversation with www.aravot.am. He said that at the end of the 1990s, Aravot would already use new technologies, and the journalists would not give the articles to the typist, they would type and store those themselves. “Aram Abrahamyan, the editor-in-chief of Aravot Daily, accepted our offer to establish a network; then we offered him to upload the newspaper to the internet. At the beginning of 1998, Aravot was already on the internet. We set up a good server, Misak Khachatryan worked on the server, and I worked on the website, and that’s how everything started. By the way, Aravot’s website was among top 50 in the CIS countries, 200 people would visit it daily; after that Azg, then other newspapers started to design websites,” Ashot Mkhoyan said. He added that in the 1990s, there was the Armenian Computer Center, which helped adopt new technologies in Armenia. Aravot would often get assistance from that center. Mkhoyan is convinced that printed newspapers will gradually become a thing of the past, since the online press is triumphing today, and Aravot with its www.aravot.am new website has a great opportunity to come close to television.
Gohar HAKOBYAN
