Family business
loid publisher.
A key reason for their recent success: obsequious loyalty to the Kremlin. The father, Aram Gabrelyanov, refers to President Vladimir Putin as the “father of the nation”— a fealty that was rewarded when one of Putin’s oldest friends spent $80 million to become a key shareholder in the Gabrelyanovs’ holding company, News Media, providing it with a flood of cash for investment.
Its purchasing power and carefully cultivated contacts are what brought Lifenews its first Snowden exclusive: a picture of the systems analyst leaving the airport after Russia granted him asylum Aug. 1. That was followed Oct. 7 by the image of Snowdencarryinggroceries in Moscow. With its savvy for scoops, the company often works as a de facto arm of Kremlin power — humiliating Putin’s opponents by catching them in all sorts of misdeeds.
It isn’t just the Kremlin that values the Gabrelyanovs.
The public feeds on their coverage, too, because they are among the few people in Russian media still able to break news — even if it’s with a strong establishment slant — enabling them to generate the clicks and the buzz that sterile state media can no longer muster.
Aram Gabrelyanov, who resembles a miniaturized, fleshier version of James Gandolfini, can usually be found barking orders across the sleek newsroom to his army of young journalists. Born to an Armenian builder father, Gabrelyanov has a warm sense of humor, and it’s hard for him to go five minutes without whipping out an anecdote.
He first got the bug for tabloid journalism while at university in Soviet times, where he tricked the KGB agent on campus into letting him into the library where foreign publications were kept.
That exposure served him well when he moved to the provincial town of Ulyanovsk in the late 1980s, where he rapidly moved up in the local publishing world. He then relocated to the capital and, after a few hit-and-miss years, made it big in 2001 with his national tabloid Zhizn — Life — which now has a circulation 1.6 million.
Today, News Media Holding earns $1.5 billion per year. In addition to Life, they own Izvestia, once the official newspaper of the Soviet government, as well as another tabloid and three websites. The younger son and heir to the empire, 24year-old Ashot, runs Lifenews.ru and also a new TV station. There is no substantive division between the holding’s publications, which freely feed one another information and scoops that are then retailored for each audience. The elder son, 26-year-old Artem, directs their comic book line, with a host of
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