Journalists in the U.S. are concerned for the future. Journalists in Baku are concerned for the present.
I’ll be honest: When I received that first email almost a year ago from Terry Davidson at the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan, expressing interest in translating my book and having me visit the country, my first thought was “where the heck is that?” Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Union country near Georgia, just north of Iran, and Baku is the capital city, perched on the western shore of the Caspian sea.
I’m here this week speaking to various groups of journalists and students. And tonight, I’ll be attending a special “book launch” as the embassy begins distributing copies of Journalism 2.0 that were translated into Azerbaijani. (This is the fourth language for Journalism 2.0. Unfortunately I can still only read one.) Yesterday I spent three hours with a group of about 20 student journalists and another 3 hours with a small group of “A-list bloggers” from Baku.
The students are eager, ambitious and idealistic, just like the students I speak to in the U.S. Unlike their American counterparts, however, they have a much harder career path to travel since there really isn’t an economic model for journalism in Azerbaijan. Advertising isn’t really a factor in the media and the newspapers and TV stations here are tightly controlled by the government, which probably explains their tiny reach. In a city of about 2 million people, the largest newspaper has a circulation of about 3,000 7,000 (correction made 5/23/10).
Students work on creating a blog at a workshop at Baku Journalism School.
A few groups opposed to the government have started their own newspapers and websites, but most are nothing more than political hit publications. There is almost a complete dearth of independent journalism in the country, but the students I met with are determined to change that somehow.
To a person, they all said their primary interest in journalism is social issues. In the U.S., student journalists are more focused on sports, music, food and travel journalism. We’re lucky. When I mention this to the Azerbaijani students, they said they would like to do “fun” journalism but there are too many problems in their country to focus on such things.
Bloggers, social media activists after our session at the Azerbaijan Media Centre
The bloggers, meanwhile, are walking the walk. They report on corruption, human rights violations and other injustices in a country that is enjoying incredible economic growth due to a second oil boom. The money is being spent to spruce up downtown Baku (gleaming parks and shopping malls make certain areas of Baku measure up with more cosmopolitan cities in Europe) while basic infrastructure gets ignored, according to the people I’ve met. While we spoke, two of their friends sat in jail. They say it’s because of a parody video they produced, profiled in this New York Times story. Apparently they’re not the only journalists behind bars in this country, either.
So take a deep breath and appreciate your current situation as a journalist, whether you are looking for work or are currently unsatisfied with your position. It’s still a powerful weapon that can affect real change. That’s what the journalists in Baku hope anyway.
Mark Briggs 
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Ex-minister’s AND ADVISOR TO THE GOV OF BAKU assets scrutinized
Investigative committee freezes accounts of Mantelis and his best man; ND wants former PM Simitis to testify
A state committee set up to investigate money laundering yesterday called for the freezing of a Greek bank account belonging to Anastasios Mantelis, a former transport minister under the previous PASOK government who earlier this week admitted to accepting payments from the Greek branch of German electronics giant Siemens.
The committee is to probe all the assets of the former minister, who on Thursday was banned from leaving the country and charged with “seeking to legalize revenues from criminal activity” after it emerged that some of the cash he received from Siemens Hellas between 1998 and 2000 had been spent on his son’s education.
A cross-party financial committee is also seeking access to all the declaration of income statements (“pothen esches”) made by Mantelis during his political career.
According to sources, the head of the anti-money-laundering committee, Stelios Grozos, has also frozen a Greek bank account in the name of Giorgos Tsougranis, Mantelis’s best man. It is thought that undetermined sums were transferred into this account from another account opened at a Swiss bank by Tsougranis under the code name “A Rocco.”
Earlier this week, Mantelis testified that 200,000 German marks (around 100,000 euros) were deposited into Tsougranis’s Swiss account in November 1998 by Siemens Hellas. Documents related to the case suggest that cash deposited into the Swiss account had come from a slush fund used to pay off politicians and public officials to secure public contracts. Tsougranis is expected to be charged as an accomplice to money laundering over the next few days.
In a related development, the main opposition New Democracy party called for Costas Simitis, who was premier when Mantelis was transport minister, to be summoned by the investigative committee. On Thursday, Simitis expressed “sadness and outrage” at Mantelis’s statement. Reacting to ND’s calls for Simitis to testify, government spokesman Giorgos Petalotis remarked, “Targeting specific individuals in order to create an impression can sometimes hinder the search to uncover the truth.”
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