The Armenian Weekly turns the page

This is the final print edition of The Armenian Weekly.

Six months ago, I wrote my first editorial. I noted, perhaps superstitiously, that the Weekly had lasted 91 years—the same age as my grandfather when he passed. It struck me less as coincidence and more as inheritance—a sign that some things, like memory, don’t end. They simply change form.

This paper has never just been a record. It has been a relay, a stitched seam between homeland and diaspora, between silence and articulation, between fracture and belonging. 

And it has been deeply personal.

I began 2025 preparing to publish my first issue on New Year’s Day. I found myself—like so many editors before me—pulled into the archives. I came across a 1979 special issue of the Armenian Review, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Hairenik. The issue reprinted coverage from the Hairenik’s early years. One photo stopped me cold: a group of Sassountsis in 1912.

What I hadn’t known is that the Armenian-American community—newly arrived, mostly laborers, many undocumented—had mobilized around the crisis in Sassoun. They raised the equivalent of nearly $400,000 in today’s money. Many returned to fight—some died. And the Hairenik chronicled it all, with names, appeals and urgency.

1912 was also the year my ancestors fled Sassoun for what would become Soviet Armenia. I couldn’t help but wonder: did the support raised here help them survive? Now, 113 years later, here I was, publishing a paper now that may have saved their lives then.

These aren’t just full-circle moments. They’re proof that we are our own continuity. 

Over the century, this paper has reached kitchens and coffee tables from Watertown to Fresno, Hartford to Detroit—often even crossing these shores. People saw their wedding announcements here, their children’s names in graduation lists, their poems, their protests, their grief. Sometimes the paper offered answers, but more often, it offered something else: recognition—the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was paying attention.

This is what the Hairenik and the Weekly have always done: smuggled the unspeakable across borders, translated the invisible, and archived what regimes wanted us to forget. They carried news when the wires were silent and offered continuity when Armenia felt like a ghost.

And now, we arrive at another rupture.

Artsakh is gone. Iran is under fire. Russia has withdrawn. Turkey waits. Azerbaijan circles. And Armenia’s government—inept at best, authoritarian at worst—picks fights with everyone but the fascists surrounding us. They cut down the trees of a smog-strangled Yerevan and call it development. They arrest journalists, muzzle opposition, slash social programs, undermine the Church, alienate the diaspora, and ignore the refugees and survivors of the war they lost.

There is a war within a war within a war. And if it is not external, it is internal. In a time like this, a free and persistent press matters more than ever.

With print subscriptions now reaching fewer than 1 in 5 readers—a number that continues to fall—we’re redirecting resources to where our community lives: online.

The demand for our reporting has never been greater. That’s why we’re embracing our digital future—not as a retreat, but as an expansion. Digitally, we’ll move faster, reach farther, archive in real time, invite new voices, and be read across continents at once. 

A full era has committed itself to the archive. Now a new one opens—faster, borderless, and still just as stubborn in its service to truth.

As we transition to digital-first reporting—while continuing special print magazine issues for milestone moments—the archives become our bedrock. While print’s regular rhythm may end, its soul continues through special issue magazines—more frequent and ambitious than ever. 

And in the meantime, the Hairenik Digital Archives has preserved every page since the very beginning, safeguarding paper in a communal memory bank. If you haven’t already, subscribe today—because preserving our past and reporting our present shouldn’t hinge on paper’s fragile economics but on our collective will to remember.

From the folded page to the open tab. From the inked column to the living scroll. 

Through this transition, we gain immediacy, longevity and accessibility. We enter an age when the news doesn’t wait a week—it finds you.

The paper has always been a lifeline. Now, it becomes a constellation.

Someday, someone will scroll through the digital archives. They’ll find the Sassoun issue, the news of Talaat Pasha’s assassination, the announcements of the First Republic and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Through it all, the paper adapts and expands. We write forward, in whatever the medium.

And, as our Weekly team says to each other at the end of each phone call, I’ll see you online.

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Lilly Torosyan

Editor

Lilly Torosyan is editor of the Armenian Weekly and a member of the Armenian Nutmegger community. (That’s Connecticut nutmegs by way of Sasun walnuts). Her writing focuses on the confluence of identity, cultural continuity and language – especially within the global Armenian communities. She previously served as the assistant project manager at h-pem, an Armenian cultural platform launched by the Hamazkayin Central Executive Board, and a freelance writer in Armenia.

Latest posts by Lilly Torosyan (see all)

• War is an ugly duckling - July 12, 2025
• The Armenian Weekly turns the page - June 26, 2025
• May 1: A date etched in labor, legacy and the printed word - May 1, 2025