Dear Readers:

Once again I am compelled to ask for your assistance. In response to our request last year, many people came to the aid of Hetq. Without your support, investigative journalism cannot exist and continue to develop in Armenia. Every month some 100,000 people read our publication. This is no small number. Most of our readers visit the English version of Hetq. If each of our readers provides us with just $25 a year in return for what we publish, it will enable us to embark on larger and more interesting projects.

All information is valued and has its price in the world. The subjects we cover are no less important than the humanitarian causes you support through charitable donations. Corruption, human trafficking, poverty, the environment, violations of the law by politicians and oligarchs, lapses within the judicial system—these and many other issues that Hetq consistently addresses are very important in the development and strengthening of our homeland.

There are subjects that our weekly is unable to address because we lack the financial resources to send reporters and photographers to the various marzes of Armenia and abroad and to provide what they need to stay there for a considerable period of time and conduct independent investigations. We haven't been able to conclude our investigation of the situation in the Calcutta College, because we can't check the facts at our disposal on the spot. The same holds true for our reports on human trafficking, a phenomenon that requires visits to Turkey, Russia, and various Arab countries—again, impossible because of a lack of resources. Sometimes, in the course of an investigation, criminal links lead to other former Soviet republics and we are unable to fully investigate these cases. For similar reasons, we do not report as often as we would like to on social and economic problems in Nagorno-Karabakh and the border regions of Armenia.

The translation of our articles into English also requires serious expenditures. The demand for the English version of our weekly is especially great abroad, but we are unable to translate many of our articles.

An investigative weekly loses its meaning if it is not independent. This is something the people we target in our reports understand very well. They offer us financial assistance, but we know what financing by a state official, an oligarch, or a partisan organization might mean for an independent media outlet—a loss of independence, bias, an inability to report on certain subjects. This is why we decline, categorically and in principle, any outside offer of financial support.

We ask instead for the support of our readers, who now number 100,000. Grateful for the assistance provided to us so far, we once again appeal to you, asking for your assistance in preserving and developing investigative journalism in Armenia. I am confident that your right to be informed is important to each and every one of you, and I believe that none of you will hesitate to give a mere $25 a year to make use of that right. By doing so, you will promote independent journalism in Armenia as well.

Thanks and best wishes to all of our readers,

Edik Baghdasaryan
Editor-in-chief, Hetq Online
Chairman, Investigative Journalists of Armenia