Making history: Georgia offers live news in Azeri, Armenian

For the first time in the history of Georgia, the public broadcaster is hosting live news shows in Armenian and Azeri languages for Georgia’s ethnic minority groups. 

From today, every night at 6pm and 8pm Georgia’s Public Broadcaster (GPB) will host Moambe news show, where viewers can press a button and choose to listen to the show in Georgian, Armenian or Azeri language. 

The project, announced today, was very unique in the post-Soviet space and was made possible thanks to financial support of the United States (US) Embassy to Georgia and implemented by the GPB and Georgia’s Regional Broadcasting Association. 

This will be a chance for ethnic minorities to receive information in real time and not afterwards through other sources. This will also increase GPB’s accessibility to all viewers,” said US Ambassador to Georgia Ian Kelly after today’s presentation of the project. 

The latest Census in Georgia, carried out in 2014, showed 3,713, 804 people live in Georgia. Of this, 233,000 were Azerbaijani, the largest ethnic minority group, while 168,000 people were Armenian.

GPB general director Giorgi Baratashvili said it was "a very ambitious” project that required a lot of effort to implement and he believed it would bring great benefits to Georgia’s ethnic minorities.

Head of Georgia’s Broadcasting Association Natia Kuprashvili said the project "would fill the information gap between ethnic minorities and the rest Georgian population, and would avoid controversies caused by lack of information or wrong information.” 

GPB was now investigating the viability of adding Abkhazian and Russian languages to the news segment in the future.