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"Free Press is destroyed and almost all the media have been bought and serve the interests of elite groups," Mehman Aliyev the head of Turan said characterizing the situation in Azerbaijan.

As Turan reports, on the World Press Freedom Day occasion, representatives of NGOs and independent journalism in Azerbaijan laid flowers to the monument chief editor of the magazine Monitor, Elmar Huseynov, who was murdered by hired assassins on March 2, 2005.

Laying flowers at the memorial of Elmar Huseynov has become a tradition, not only on May 3, but on other days of journalistic dates, said the Director of the agency Turan, Mehman Aliyev.

According to him neither the report by Freedom House, nor the Reporters without Borders report can convey the pain that Azerbaijani journalists experience, daily confronting with the suppression of freedom of speech.

A new trend in journalism is the use of media structures of elite groups in the internecine struggle. "There are proofs for this," he said.

The head of the Institute for Reporters Freedom and Safety, Emin Huseynov, called depressing the situation in the light of the arrest of the Zerkalo newspaper columnist, Rauf Mirkadirov, and suspension of the daily edition of the publication.

Huseynov said that over the last year the institute recorded deterioration in all areas, in particular the legislative restriction of freedom of speech and judicial harassment of journalists.

At the beginning of 2014 in the country in prison were 11 journalists and bloggers, said the coordinator of the Media Rights Institute Khalid Agaliyev, calling unprecedented the pressure on the social network of bloggers over the last year.

The international human rights organization Freedom House put Azerbaijan at the 183rd place in the ranking of press freedom in the world. The Azerbaijani media have a further decline due to increased government control over the Internet and correspondence of journalists and bloggers; blocking sites, interference in the satellite broadcasting of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, the report notes.

All the speakers sounded the idea that in spite of the serious condition of independent Azerbaijani journalists, global trends in the Internet, new information technologies and information society offer hope for optimism, Turan writes.