by Hrag Vartanian
In 1865 a Boston Post editorial declared, "Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." Little did the editors of the now defunct paper know a century and a half later those wires now link Boston to the world and structure the modern information age.
Today, as one of the largest media markets in America, Boston attracts bright minds with keen eyes and ears for mass communications. Boston Armenians can boast a number of media players in every field including advertising, journalism, film and television.
BRANDING ED ESKANDARIAN
After a career in rocket science and experience owning two communications firms, Ed Eskandarian admits to having learned an important thing about himself, "I didn't see myself as a risk-taker but clearly to own your own business and invest your own money is a risk."
A native of Telham, Pennsylvania, Eskandarian studied engineering at Philadelphia's Villanova University. His first job designing heat shields for NASA's Apollo spacecraft left him unfulfilled and he yearned something more motivating. He took a crack at Harvard Business School and after graduation he found himself among New York's Madison Avenue ad gurus working with bigwig clients like Procter & Gamble. After seven years in New York he had had enough. He found the lifestyle difficult and the four-hour daily commute from Connecticut maddening. He returned back to Boston and enjoyed working at a small agency. Over a ten-year period he moved up into management and purchased the firm, HBM/Creamer, in 1982.
He was surprised how naturally he took to entrepreneurship, "I really liked the fact that decisions were mine alone to make. It revealed to me the responsibilities of business, not only to make a profit but to provide an environment and a career path for your employees to grow and participate in the success of the company."
His track record is impressive. According to Advertising Age, he transformed his second company, Arnold Communications from a $40 million firm ranked 151st nationally in 1990 into a $156 million agency ranked 24th by the end of the decade. A Boston industry insider credits Eskandarian with having built the city's advertising network and receiving very little credit for it.
"There are advantages to Boston," Eskandarian insists, "We're finding more and more clients from around the country and the world like the idea of not going to New York. They will come here if they can find the quality of service. I don't think any of our top 10 clients are from Boston, for instance, Volkswagen is from Michigan, Royal Caribbean Cruise is from Miami, Verizon from New York, and the anti-smoking American Legacy Group from Washington D.C."
Clients hire Arnold to create an integrated communications package, "They want a brand concept that can be communicated through television, print, the web, direct marketing, public relations, sports marketing, design, collateral material, point of sale, billboards...so we do all that. We make everything they do sound like one voice from one company."
He sold Arnold to Snyder Communications in 1998 and Havas Advertising of France purchased the company last year, entrusting Eskandarian as the head of their Campus global network. Today, as CEO of Arnold Worldwide Partners, formerly Arnold-Campus, he is busy expanding its international profile and continues to purchase agencies in Canada, South America, Australia, Europe and most recently in China.
Eskandarian has witnessed the field explode into a fast-paced industry where company ownership changes regularly, partnerships are becoming rare, and the loyalty factor of employees has diminished. The Internet has also been an agent of change but Eskandarian sees it as part of a continuum, "It's no different from driving down a highway and looking at a billboard. You have eight seconds to catch their attention."
While work dominates his life his Armenian culture has been a source of pride for him. Growing up in an old Pennsylvania Dutch town, he spent countless hours traveling back and forth to community events in Philadelphia. He still offers a hand when he can and a few years ago the Cambridge Yerevan Sister City Association asked him to meet with a number of Armenian businessmen visiting Boston, "They were trying to figure out what they might develop for export to America and other countries. They bought me a bottle of cognac and they said it was the brandy Winston Churchill drank. I said, 'There's your first export product. You can tie that in with the cigar brand he smoked and you can promote your brandy based on the brand Churchill drank and you can have a viable business.'"
His Armenian heritage continues to inspire him, "It represents a determination and commitment to hard work, strong family, strong church and each person has to do for themselves and their family. I think that's what made me work hard and achieve what I did. I think that's adherent in most Armenians."
WEAVING ARMENIAN ISSUES INTO A COMMUNITY CONSCIOUSNESS
Stephen Kurkjian and Ted Bogosian
News and Projects Editor of The Boston Globe, Stephen Kurkjian concurs, "What was drilled into me was that I have every opportunity in this wonderful land to make a success of myself. If you make a success of yourself you'll bring great honor to your parents, your larger family and your community."
Raised in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, the Armenian presence in Kurkjian's life was defined by close knit family and in retrospect he realizes it played a role in his career choice, "I've always seen being Armenian as being direct. You get ahead by working hard. I found that directness in many reporters I met during my university days. I liked their direct and honest approach but I didn't think of newspapering as a profession, only a way station at the time, so I went to law school."
Driven by a vision of law that helped people improve their lives he worked part-time at The Boston Globe while finishing his law degree from Suffolk University in 1970.
The following year two news events changed his view of journalism, the Kennedy accident at Chappaquiddick and the Woodstock Music Festival. He describes the Woodstock experience, an event that defined the sixties generation, and his role in its news coverage, "I happened to be going to Woodstock and came upon 400,000 people. I thought to myself, 'This is a news story!' and called the paper. The press tent was empty because the media wasn't able to get through, so I was alone except for an AP [Associated Press] reporter hovering above in a helicopter. I sent stories for four or five days. I realized how exciting and daring news could be."
An invigorated Kurkjian placed his law career on hold and immersed himself in the 'newsbiz', "You're right up front asking questions at the age of 26. People are answering you directly and your story is splashed across the front page—you matter."
Early in his career he received industry recognition by winning two Pulitzers for his work as part of a Boston Globe investigative team. The first in 1973 was awarded for unveiling corruption in Somerville's (MA) city government, and the second followed seven years later for an exposé on the Metro Boston Transit Authority.
He joined the Washington D.C. press corps and presided over The Globe's Capital Bureau for a brief period starting in 1986. His longing for Boston brought him back.
In 1990, an event changed Kurkjian's life forever. He traveled with his father to the village of Keghi near Kharpert in historic Armenia, where his father was born. His father wanted to see what time had washed from his memory. Kurkjian didn't think he would be affected, he discovered otherwise, "I was told, go to the neighborhood that has the vineyards or the freestanding church that may now be a mosque—that was the Armenian neighborhood. Every place I looked, remnants of Armenian life could still be seen. I saw people like us, people that looked like my cousins and family. It humanized them."
He wrote about the experience in The Boston Globe's Sunday Magazine and carefully sifted through the quagmire of emotions that accompanied his father's rediscovery, "As an Armenian, it was more complicated. Seeing the remnants of Armenian civilization reflected in the region's majesty, in its monuments, churches, neighborhoods, and vineyards, my overwhelming emotion was a rage that so much could be lost without condemnation, apology, and redress."
The event is still an emotional one for Kurkjian as he reflects on his own cultural discovery, "It was so poignant. The doors seemed to open and say 'this is who you are and this is where you are from.' So learning about it meant learning about the achievement of us as a people."
Published in 1993, the article received praise from many Globe readers as it helped many understand their own ethnicity. Kurkjian realized that his people's history had been shattered into a million pieces and he simply helped assemble some of those disparate pieces.
When he returned he was surprised to find Genocide survivors and other Armenians flocking to his lectures about the experience, "All I could say was 'What wonderful villages you lived in and I can understand your mourning.'"
Investigating is what Kurkjian does best and The Boston Globe has given him every opportunity to realize his journalistic skills. As the last mainstream U.S. paper dedicated to the values of the left, The Globe, according to Kurkjian, "is dedicated to the people and the city. People who don't have anywhere else to turn come to the newspaper because they feel it's the place of last recourse." Serving an increasingly ethnic Boston, the paper remains committed to helping the city's less fortunate that once included Italians and Armenians and today includes waves of Asian and Hispanic immigrants.
Now a proud Armenian American, his identity has become a new source of pride, "My heritage inspires me. It means facing each day with a bright outlook but I still do it for the Kurkjian name. When I do a good story my cousins and aunts always call."
Ted Bogosian has also had the opportunity to explore his Armenian American identity through his work as a documentary filmmaker.
While his parents originally hail from Watertown, Bogosian was born and raised in northern New Jersey and relocated to Watertown after college. In 1978, while attending Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he started a summer job at Boston's flagship PBS station, WGBH, writing for the documentary, Vietnam: A Television History. Within two years he became a producer for the station's influential Nova series.
He inaugurated Bogosian Productions, Inc. on Watertown Square in 1985 and is part of a string of film production companies in the area.
An Armenian Journey was his first independent project and a culmination of his growing awareness of the Genocide. Interested in exposing the inconsistencies of the Turkish denial, he took a survivor back to her village of Arapkir in eastern Turkey and documented her story, "It is a first-person account as an Armenian American to figure out what happened at the time of the Armenian Genocide." The project enjoyed the joint support of the Alex and Marie Manoogian Foundation and PBS—who was willing to take the risk of supporting the first national prime time broadcast on the Genocide.
"I was willing to take the chance and produce the film without guarantee of broadcast. Other ethnic journalists had done similar things and once they were able to read my narration and see the film I think they felt comfortable that this was a serious investigation and that my ethnic heritage should not be held to different standards than anyone else's. After very careful review the movie turned out to be bullet-proof editorially," he explains.
Since then he has produced dozens of prime time programs for PBS on everything from space exploration to plastic surgery and often gets the opportunity to work on Armenian topics, "I've tried to keep that interest going. It's difficult because one tends to get typecast in a media profession. If it appears that a producer is only working in a particular vein it can be very limiting. I've tried to produce those programs in the flow of my career."
During the 1988 Armenian earthquake he produced both a short item for the MacNeill/Lehrer Newshour on relief efforts and Aftershock: An Armenian Family Recovers, a half hour public television program about kids victimized by the disaster. Recently he produced The Lost Treasures of Christianity with Professor Lucy Der Manuelian, "I've always wanted to lower the threshold so that other Armenian-related programs could be produced. That's what I tried to do with Lost Treasures of Christianity, which has been popular in markets around the country. It was easier to broadcast because it wasn't a political program."
Bogosian characterizes his work as all about being in the right place at the right time, "I pursue projects whose stories are unfolding. I tend to choose stories so I get in at the beginning of an event and watch the event unfold. The interviews happen while the subjects are still grappling with the challenge. I latch onto stories that are more like comets not knowing where they are going to take me, but trusting my instinct that I'll be able to reveal some intimate moments and surprising perspectives that wouldn't come unless we were present."
His current project, a documentary related to the White House, will have a theatrical release in the near future and has already received an award for its use of High Definition technology. When asked about future projects, Bogosian reveals a sequel to An Armenian Journey is already in the works, "I think it would be interesting to go back two decades later and compare Armenia of 2005 to Armenia in 1985. I also feel different as an Armenian."
At the crest of the twenty-first century, the Armenian American presence in Boston-area media will ensure a greater mainstream awareness of Armenian issues and concerns.
