“Media Advocate” initiative continues the series of interviews with the press secretaries and heads of the state agencies. This time our interlocutor is Anna Ohanyan, the press secretary to the Minister of Economy.
A change of minister usually presupposes a change of press secretary too. You worked both with former minister and with current minister. This proves the fact that you are professionally prepared, flexible when dealing with people. What has changed in your work after the previous changes in the country?
Yes, a change of minister usually implies a change in his apparatus as well, and this is exactly what happened. When Tigran Khachatryan, with whom we had worked quite fruitfully before, was appointed as minister of Economy, I eagerly returned to a very dear structure for me. I am grateful for the professional assessment. In terms of human relations, I can say with confidence that stable, friendly relations have been formed in our ministry, starting from technical personnel to management personnel, which makes the work even more pleasant. They even joke by calling me “the psychologist of the building”. My work changed significantly exactly when changes took place in the Ministry: The Ministry with various and wide functions was joined by the Ministry of Agriculture, and the tension and workload increased even more.
The work of a press secretary involves active communication with the media. How do you coordinate the work with journalists? Tell us about your working day, how many calls, requests and interview invitations do you receive per day?
It depends on the day, it can be either overloaded or too overloaded. I usually plan the tasks and meetings of the day in advance, in the morning I check the minister’s agenda, which can completely change our agenda. According to the programs initiated by our officials, together with the PR team, we develop programs and campaigns of awareness. I accept and respond to calls from journalists, I get 10-15 calls on average every day, there are also a lot of invitations for interviews, and I always follow the requests on the electronic document management system, edit, agree or ask for corrections. When we invite journalists to comment to the ministry, as a rule, I accompany them. And if the person invited for the interview is an official from our ministry, then I carry out preparatory work and often accompany them. Sometimes I myself propose different topics, especially to colleagues who prepare television reports on economics. A significant part of the day is devoted to the production and editing of information materials – texts, pictures, videos. Not only the volume of the load, but also its diversity is very tiring: I can, with a difference of a minute, be forced to comment on the tourist flows and on the program of breeding cattle imported to Armenia. But this very diversity never lets me get bored at work.
What problems do you face while working with our information field? In general, what are Armenian journalists like, is it easy to work with them?
Armenian journalists are brave, persistent and demanding. It was due to or because of the journalists that I changed my work tempo significantly. They do not like to wait when urgent, important information is needed, a written request can freak them out. If you want to be to some extent respected and accepted in the journalistic community, then the shortest way to their hearts is efficiency and transparency. As a difficulty, I can note that some colleagues are reluctant to receiving statements of denials and clarifications.
Tell us about the latest most successful programs of the Ministry. What goals were set and to what extent were they achieved?
It will be convenient for me to mark the part of the work that is public, since there is a huge amount of work that remains in the shadows and is not subject to information, for example, long-term development programs, sectoral strategies, legislative changes. Amid the pandemic, the first aid to small and medium-sized businesses was the third event, which in the short term we can already consider a successful program. We have high expectations from the 19th event, which is for business creators from scratch. We are very excited to see future businessmen now taking courses in entrepreneurship and digital literacy. During this time, I also followed what kind of difficult discussions were with the private sector of tourism and related fields in order to assist the most affected areas. Efforts to match the needs of the private sector and the capabilities of government tools were combined in a recently adopted grant program. We used a similar path for the adoption of the procurement plan. I think that in the context of neutralizing the economic consequences of the coronavirus, our ministry has made such fundamental changes to the programs of state support in the field of agriculture that it has never been so accessible and attractive to engage in agriculture using state aid instruments. We also managed to implement a very bold pilot project։ an investment program for agricultural insurance, which will be expanded in the near future. I would like to mention two large and unprecedented programs of state support in the field of agriculture that have already started: keeping records of cattle, and the production of winter wheat.
