Armenian graduate students are learning journalism skills in Spokane newsrooms
Five journalism graduate students from the American University of Armenia are spending three weeks in four newsrooms in Spokane, exploring familiar fields and putting their training into practice in a new country.
Despite its relatively short period, the internship exposes the students to a different environment and culture, providing them with new opportunities to experience journalism in media organizations thousands of miles away from their homes.
Students are part of the AUA Master of Arts in Multiplatform Journalism program, a 14-month graduate program developed through a partnership between AUA and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication and funded through a U.S. State Department grant.
The program emphasizes practical, skills-based journalism, with students producing stories across print, television, audio and digital platforms. In comparison with the other universities in Armenia that are heavily focused on theory and less hands-on experience, the program blends practical knowledge with theory through a thoroughly developed curriculum and experienced faculty.
“The main goals of the program are to train current and prospective journalists in the practices of American-style journalism, in terms of factual and thorough reporting, being fair and balanced with the people you’re interviewing, not putting your own opinions into stories, and not letting political influences guide your reporting,” said Shawn McIntosh, assistant professor, Multiplatform Journalism program chair, and director of the Center for Excellence in Journalism
Lawrence Pintak, founding Dean of WSU Murrow College of Communication, former journalist and CBS News correspondent, described the program as Armenia’s first fully professionally focused and skill-based program.
“We at Murrow College at WSU helped AUA to create a journalism program. We created the curriculum for the master’s degree that you are in and helped hire the faculty and advise them in various ways,” Pintak said.
The U.S. internship is one of the components of the program. Designed to acquaint students with American newsroom practices, 11 students were selected for the internship in the U.S.
The selection was based on several factors, including their academic performance, interests and attendance. The internship is taking place in several locations throughout the region: five students in Spokane, two in Seattle, another two in Wenatchee, and the last two in Lewiston. Those who could not make it to the internship in the U.S. will complete their internships in Armenia.
“First of all, as a journalist, it’s really important for you to have a broad worldview, to experience things, to recognize that other people look at things from a different perspective than you do,” Pintak said.
The choice of newsrooms was intentional. Instead of placing students only in large national organizations, the program looked for opportunities in smaller and medium-sized newsrooms that are similar to the ones in Armenia. In this way, the students could become directly involved in reporting and be more ready for newsrooms back in their hometowns.
“In a huge news organization, you just kind of get buried,” McIntosh said. “But the fact that you are getting put into medium-sized cities or small towns, you can have a real impact.”
For the five students in Spokane, this is more than a requirement to graduate from the program; it is a real-life experience to step into an American newsroom, work alongside international partners and enhance the skills they got from Armenia.
Meet the students
For Lori Ishilian, journalism doesn’t stop at telling people what happened. It’s supposed to help people understand the world around them.
Ishilian is a Lebanese-Armenian journalist who works in the Office of Communications at AUA where she focuses on marketing. Her work involves shaping stories and information for different audiences, an experience that has also influenced the way she approaches journalism.
While her work has given her practical experience in communications, marketing and digital storytelling, the program has helped her develop those skills through a journalism lens. The two have become closely connected in the way she thinks about stories, audiences and the platforms used to reach them.
That connection is also part of what brought her to Spokane. During her three-week internship at KHQ, Ishilian is experiencing how a U.S. newsroom operates .
What Ishilian values most about journalism is the responsibility that comes with it. Trust and accuracy are essential, she said, because a story can shape how people understand an event, an issue or even the people around them. But responsibility is only part of it.
“I also think curiosity is one of the most important traits of a journalist,” Ishilian said.
A good journalist, she believes, should be willing to ask questions even when they think they already know the answer. More importantly, they should have a genuine desire to understand people and the stories they have to tell.
Her internship at KHQ is giving her a chance to see that process up close. She wants to understand what happens before a story reaches an audience: how ideas are developed, how stories are assigned, how reporters make decisions under pressure and how editors shape the final product.
One of her first impressions of an American newsroom was its pace.
“I think the biggest surprise was seeing how fast everything moves,” Ishilian said. “Even when you’re watching the process from the outside, you don’t always realize how many decisions are being made in such a short amount of time.”
Coming from Armenia, Ishilian also was struck by the size of the newsroom and the number of people involved in producing a story. Watching that collaboration has given her a better understanding of what it takes to bring a story to an audience.
The AUA journalism program has encouraged her to look beyond what happened and consider why a story matters, what context it needs and whose perspective may be missing.
At KHQ, she is particularly interested in local journalism. She is observing how reporters decide what matters to their communities, build relationships with sources and cover issues that have a direct impact on people’s lives.
For her, one of the clearest signs that the experience has been worthwhile would be seeing something in Spokane and thinking, “We should try this in Armenia.
Yeva Minasyan tells the stories in more than one way. A multimedia journalist from Armenia, she works as the multimedia editor and podcast producer at EVN Report, an English-language news website in Armenia. She also hosts and produces podcasts at the Public Radio of Armenia. Her work spans digital, audio and video, but at KREM, she wanted to get firsthand experience in an American local newsroom setting.
For Minasyan, the most important part of journalism is the human being at the center of every story.
“Behind every statistic, announcement or breaking news story, there are actual people whose lives are being affected,” she said.
That is why she sees curiosity as an indispensable quality for journalists. It means continuing to ask questions even after a story seems familiar, and of course, learning how to listen.
Working in a different language and media environment also has allowed her to test herself in ways she cannot easily do back home. She said she hopes by the end of the three weeks, she will feel more comfortable working in an American newsroom and more confident adapting to unfamiliar journalistic routines.
That adjustment came with an unexpected feeling: being a beginner again.
“I’ve worked in journalism for a while, but being in a new country, in a different kind of newsroom and working in a different language made me look at journalism from a completely different angle,” Minasyan said. “It was actually exciting to realize how much there was still for me to learn and be excited about ordinary things again.”
Being a beginner reminded her that there is plenty left to learn. It also allowed her to look at journalism through a new lens.
Her experience in the master’s program has fueled that feeling of possibility.
Now, she wants to return to Armenia with something less tangible but just as valuable: a notebook full of ideas. The things she sees during these three weeks may become experiments she tries in Armenia. If she leaves with new skills, stories she is proud of, good memories and a long list of things she wants to try, Minasyan said, the experience will have been a success.
Public Relations specialist with a background in translation and communications, Roza Chibukhchyan finds journalism to be more than storytelling. For her, it also is a tool to promote values such as integrity, democracy and truth-seeking .
Chibukhchyan holds a bachelor’s degree in English and communications and also a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language from AUA. The opportunity for the master’s program came at a time when she was looking for other prospects outside of Armenia, but its curriculum drew her back.
“When I looked at the curriculum, I realized many of the courses aligned with my overall interests,” Chibukhchyan said. “Choosing to apply was a no-brainer.”
For Chibukhchyan, this move is more than an internship; it is a realization of dreams and an opportunity to see how her knowledge works in practice. Amazed by the speed of the newsroom, Chibukhchyan gets her first real-life experience at KXLY.
“The newsroom works like a well-oiled machine, where every role supports the other to make the show come to life by a certain deadline,” Chibukhchyan said.
Her experience in Spokane helped her to see how the internship connects with what she learned at AUA. Shadowing reporters at KXLY, Chibukhchyan once more remembers what McIntosh had emphasized in class: the modern reporter sometimes has to function as “a one-man production team.”
For Chibukhchyan, the internship is about testing those skills for herself. She hopes to pitch and produce her own story package, appear on television and leave Spokane confident that she has the practical skills to contribute to a similar newsroom.
“Overall, I consider being here a huge success already,” she said. “It all is very new and fascinating to me, and it gets better as I become more familiar with the KXLY newsroom.”
Born and raised in Beirut, Dikran Seferian would never imagine that five years after landing in Armenia, he would find himself in the U.S. for an internship in a field that wasn’t originally on his career path.
Seferian, an associate content manager at a marketing agency, said he believes journalism is a powerful tool for shaping people’s perspectives. Before applying to the program, Seferian had a different perception of journalists.
“I always used to think journalists were obnoxious and annoying, but a few weeks into the program, I came to realize that the only way to succeed in this profession is to be obnoxious and annoying, in a respectful way of course, and within boundaries,” Seferian said.
That persistence is part of what makes journalism meaningful, he said.
“In the words of Finley Peter Dunne, the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and that’s something that will always be at the back of my head when I’m working on stories,” Seferian said.
Curious about the environment, sports, technology, and human stories in general, Seferian discovers the characters not only through words, but also through camera lenses.
“Sometimes a photo itself can speak a thousand words,” he said.
Now interning at The Spokesman-Review, Seferian gets a firsthand look at the pace of the American newsroom and is surprised by the speed and accuracy of the reporters.
“The reporter can attend an event or press conference at 3 and the story would be ready by 5,” he said.
Shadowing, observing and contributing, Seferian finds The Spokesman-Review to be the ideal place to do his internship given its century-old history and well-refined strategies and culture of reporting.
“Journalism in Armenia is very different than it is in this part of the world, so anything I learn here can be something that I can use to potentially improve how things are done back home, such as interviewing and building relationships with sources,” Seferian said.
Two years ago, Elen Pahlevanyan would not have named journalism as a possible career. Today, she is spending three weeks inside an American newsroom, learning what it takes to turn events into stories under deadline. Pahlevanyan, who has a bachelor’s degree in English and communications from AUA, works as a media lab and communications coordinator in AUA’s Office of Communications. Writing is one of her passions, but it was the multimedia journalism program that changed how she understood the field and showed her how closely it could connect with the skills she already was developing in her job.
For Pahlevanyan, journalism matters because of what people learn from it. Journalism, she said, can help people become more informed citizens by encouraging them to question information, seek credible sources and avoid spreading false claims or unnecessary panic.
“What you put on your media, that is what your society learns,” Pahlevanyan said.
That belief carries particular weight for Pahlevanyan. She described Armenia as being in a historical period and sees journalism as one way of helping society understand what is happening and introducing the country to a wider world. The media environment at home also strengthened her belief in the need for ethical journalism. Those were the reasons she applied to to AUA’s journalism program, which reaffirmed the responsibility of journalists toward the public and challenged her to work across different platforms and situations.
Her internship at The Spokesman-Review is giving her a chance to put that preparation into practice. One of her biggest surprises has been the speed of the newsroom.
“As students, we usually take our time and have the headlines beforehand, while in newsrooms you should be ready to give the coverage within a few hours after the event,” she said.
The internship is also about experiencing a place that can sometimes feel distant from Armenia.
Pahlevanyan described the opportunity as a rare chance to see a part of the world that can seem unreachable from home. Beyond learning how an American newsroom operates, she hopes to meet people with different backgrounds and perspectives, experience local culture and gain practical skills.
“I would consider the internship successful if I have learned something new, become more confident in my abilities, and gained a better understanding of the field I’m interested in,” she said.
But she has a more tangible measure of success, too: seeing her own stories published and acknowledged.
That would turn her internship from an observation of American journalism into a chance to participate in it. And perhaps it would offer one more reminder of how far she has come from the person who, just two years ago, would never have considered journalism a career.
