In the proceedings of the 29th Convention of the General Assembly of the Alliance of Balkan News Agencies (ABNA), which this year is being held in Prishtina under the organization of KosovaPress News Agency, the importance of introducing tourism through the media and the opportunities for cooperation that may exist between public institutions for tourism and the media are also being discussed.
Besa Luzha from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung stated at the opening of the panel that when talking about news, one always thinks about political issues, but that the time has come for the countries of the region to know each other and their tourist attractions.
She said that the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung has highly praised the event organized by KosovaPress, and sees it as a good example for fighting “fake news”.
“When we received the invitation from KosovaPress to support this meeting, we highly appreciated the importance of such a meeting of News Agencies in general, which means your cooperation in the networking you have, but especially the meeting in Kosovo, since KosovaPress as a new agency of a new country, it will have the presidency this year, and it is very interesting for all of us that during this presidency, Kosovo will really have good examples of fighting ‘fake news’, of cooperation with other agencies, and the long avoidance of the challenges that news agencies have, precisely because of the great attack of portals, or ‘fake news’ portals that have overtaken the public space and which do not do any good to democracy”, said Luzha.
Speaking about regional cooperation, Luzha said that citizens of all countries in the region need to know other things and not just politics, mentioning tourism and culture.
“As we saw in ‘Tirana Resolution’, in order for the people to know through your news, about tourism, cultural heritage, culture in general, economic development, industry, crafts, for all these, to inform the citizens and for them to have accurate information, that through this to stimulate the cooperation not only of the institutions of the formal segments as is the case of this meeting, but also of the people themselves, so to stimulate them through the truth, reported by you. For example, of what they can visit in Prishtina or Prizren, in Sofia, Skopje, Tirana or any other city. A lot of this information often from different countries has a different kind of mission, not the truth, but maybe to attack another country, to stimulate tourism in its own country, so a kind of battle is fought with these news”, said Luzha.
The 29th ABNA Assembly and Conference is supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC.
