Meanwhile, investigative journalism in Azerbaijan had lost ground since the hopeful days of 1991. At first, in the wake of independence, the media situation had improved greatly. While the local media had never been able to call itself a free press, the parameters for freedom of expression had expanded far beyond what existed in Soviet times. Opposition newspapers took root. The Turan Information Agency, founded in 1990 by journalists who refused to work in state media, consistently delivered hard-hitting reports on politics, the economy, religion, finance and more. ^[9] In parallel, nongovernmental organizations devoted to public policy issues such as transparency, human rights, rule of law and corruption flourished. In 2001, the country joined the Council of Europe; it later signed the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

As Aliyev pére and son tightened their hold on Azerbaijan, however, the atmosphere changed. Corruption, which had been a problem even during Soviet times, became endemic as members of the elite took advantage of the advent of a capitalist system to enrich themselves. International human rights organizations consistently downgraded Azerbaijan. But western governments courted the country’s rulers, both for its oil and gas and for its strategic location. In 2007, for example, Azerbaijan granted NATO permission to use two bases and an airfield as staging areas for its war in Afghanistan.

By then, journalists critical of the government were under siege. On March 2, 2005, Elmar Huseynov, founder and editor of the opposition weekly news magazine Monitor , was shot multiple times as he returned to his Baku apartment around 9 pm. He died on the spot. Years later, the crime remained unsolved; most journalists assumed the government stood behind it. Huseynov’s death was not the first anti-media action in Azerbaijan, but it was the most severe. The killing, says Ismayilova, resulted in media self-censorship:

Journalists stopped doing investigations. They stopped doing high profile stories. There were very few journalists who knew about [journalism] standards in the country. And there were very few journalists who had the experience of writing for international newsrooms.

She was one of the exceptions. By 2006, she was tiring of her IREX job as grants manager. She applied for and got a job with the Azerbaijani service of Voice of America (VOA) in Washington, DC. In June 2006, she moved to the US. It was not a happy experience. Ismayilova came to feel that VOA exhibited some of the same shortcomings as some East Bloc publications. She objected, for example, when editors rejected her idea to interview an Iranian human rights activist just out of jail, asking her instead to cover a solar cooking project in Africa. She was again indignant when VOA—she says at the request of a partner Azerbaijani TV station—cut from an interview with a US assistant secretary of state a section in which he referred to the Azerbaijani political opposition.

Only 18 months after her arrival, in September 2007, she resigned and returned to Baku. ICFJ immediately hired her as a media trainer; she also started to file reports on a freelance basis for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.