Skopje: The Director-General of the Bulgarian News Agency (BNA), Kiril Valchev, has been re-elected as Secretary General of the Association of Balkan News Agencies-Southeast Europe (ABNA-SE) for a second term of three years. The re-election was confirmed during the regular annual General Assembly of ABNA-SE, which took place in Skopje on Wednesday. The event was hosted by the state news agency of the Republic of North Macedonia, MIA.
According to News Agency of Nigeria, ABNA-SE is headquartered in the Bulgarian capital Sofia at the BTA’s offices. The Prime Minister of the Republic of North Macedonia, Hristijan Mickoski, addressed the Assembly under the theme ‘Truth in the Media’. Valchev emphasized that news represents the first draft of history and stressed the importance of cooperation among news agencies in sharing news archives to establish truth in media.
Valchev highlighted that the archives of the 127-year-old BTA contain over 6 million pages of paper bulletins, nearly 2 million photographs, and an archive of more than 500,000 thematic files, all of which are in the process of being digitized. He stated that these archives serve as a memory of the past and a valuable source of history, providing lessons for the present.
Ilija Musa, representing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Federal News Agency (FENA), was elected President of ABNA-SE. Meanwhile, MIA Director General, Darko Janevski, was elected to the Management Board and will continue the term of the previous MIA Director General, Dragan Antonovski, over the next two years. The third member of the Management Board is Emilios Perdikaris, Chair of the Board of Greece’s Athens News Agency-Macedonian Press Agency (ANA-MPA).