site.btaCEO of Israeli News Agency Tazpit Press Service Visits BTA

Amotz Eyal, founder and CEO of the Israeli news agency Tazpit Press Service (TPS), visited the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) on Tuesday. He was welcomed by BTA Director General Kiril Valchev and Desislava Sevova, Director of the Archives and Reference Department.

During his visit, Eyal was introduced to BTA’s archives. He was shown biographical files on notable Bulgarian figures, organized alphabetically, compiled from the periodical press and BTA’s news bulletins. He also toured the archival storage area, where photographic materials are preserved—arranged in albums with previews and descriptions, as well as negatives (around two million of them)—systematized by film with detailed records on content, year, number, and photographer’s name.

Eyal also examined the card index of the Reference Department, which is divided into “Bulgaria” and “International” sections, used for quick reference checks on the correct spelling of organization names, political parties, and official titles.

He observed the work of the team responsible for the digitization of the archives and learned more about the process of handling digitized data.

Kiril Valchev and Desislava Sevova also showed the guest the earliest BTA news item related to Israel, dating back to 1947, as well as the agency’s oldest preserved publications from 1898.

The guest also visited the agency’s library, which houses 90,000 books, along with the renovated newsroom, the national press club, and the multimedia centre.

BTA Director General Kiril Valchev noted that the agency had received an invitation from the Israeli ambassador to join a group of journalists visiting Israel, but had not taken up the offer. “We have a partnership with your agency, as well as with many others in the region. We have access to information about what’s happening, but it is not paid for by other governments,” he said. Unfortunately, we currently lack a correspondent in the region due to safety concerns, Valchev explained. “I hope we can work together to ensure safety and report directly from the source,” he added.

“The work done on the archives is remarkable. It’s very difficult to archive so much information,” said Amotz Eyal. “We’ve had twenty years of everything being digital. You have over a hundred years of history to archive and digitize,” he noted. “It’s very hard for agencies to maintain photographic records in files and to ensure everything is correctly organized. You need the exact headline and the right keywords to search the archive. I believe artificial intelligence will make this much easier in the future,” he explained.

BTA signed a cooperation agreement with TPS in 2022. Since then, BTA has published 608 news items received from TPS. BTA now has 50 partnership agreements with news agencies around the world, involving the daily exchange and publication of news content.

Since 2021, when the National Assembly made BTA’s news freely accessible, the Bulgarian national news agency has arranged new agreements with global news agencies from which it purchases content. Under these deals, all Bulgarian media outlets can freely republish the translated news in Bulgarian. This enables Bulgarian media to use, free of charge, news from national agencies across four continents—Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa—with which BTA has signed similar cooperation agreements. These include the national news agencies of all of Bulgaria’s neighbouring countries, as well as 22 European agencies that are members of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA).