Baku, September 1, AZERTAC

A book presenting each of the 125 years since the establishment of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) by one major domestic and international development will be press-launched at the Apollonia Festival of Arts at the Sozopol Art Gallery on August 30.

The book, titled News on File: 1899-2023, is the third in a set marking the anniversary that BTA celebrated in 2023. The previous two are Personal Stories, in which current and former staffers of the Agency share their experiences, and History of BTA 1898-2023, written by Panayot Denev, who was BTA Director General between 1997 and 2002, and edited by Prof. Roumiana Preshlenova, PhD, Director of the Institute of Balkan Studies with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Prof. Preshlenova also acted as a consultant for the third and last book in the series, and Denev wrote the foreword.

"We don't rank events in this book," Denev told BTA. "These are not the most important developments for each of those years. But this is what we BTA chose," he pointed out. He described the book as "show in the best sense of the word: at times it does not filter out negative developments, but in this case 'show' refers to knowledge, spectacle and fun," the former BTA head explained. He noted that selecting one domestic and one international news story for each one of the past 125 years was a tremendous effort. "This is the effort of the primary selection, the secondary selection, and the final choice."

"The book does not claim to rank the news headlines over those 125 years, it seeks to show the time spanning three centuries during which Bulgaria's news agencies has always aspired to run real news, even though during certain periods access to this news has been restricted to select users, whether owing to a political situation or financial conditions," reads the introduction to the book written by BTA Director General Kiril Valchev.

He notes that the Agency marked its 125th anniversary by opening all its news feed to everybody free of charge." "On the other hand, the delving into the archives recently revealed that viewing the news should not be limited to the current perspective because today’s news is tomorrow’s history," Valchev points out. "The memory built up in the archives make BTA a custodian of knowledge, where 'magister est posterioris prior dies' (the previous day is the teacher for the next), as the Latin dictum says," the BTA Director General adds.

He argues that the book is useful for today’s and tomorrow’s news-writers, who can more clearly see their responsibility to the present as well as to the future, where their news stories turn into lessons from the past.