The Executive Director of India’s national news agency Press Trust of India Vijay Joshi visited Veliko Tarnovo

The executive director of the Indian national news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) Vijay Joshi visited Veliko Tarnovo.
The old capital was one of the stops of the journalist, who is in Bulgaria, at the invitation of the general director of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA) Kiril Valchev.
In Veliko Tarnovo, Vijay Joshi got acquainted with the work of the first non-capital press club of BTA. He said that PTI has about 30 offices in India, but the agency is private and therefore does not have a network of press clubs. Press conferences are organized by other institutions. There are 29 states in India, each state has its capital, in each of them PTI has its own correspondent bureau, somewhere there are two. The agency’s correspondents are about 680, and stringers are over 2,500. They create video, photo and text, he pointed out.
Joshi comments on the role of modern technology in journalistic work. On the one hand, they ease the purely technical part of the speed of coverage of an event, but on the other hand, they hide a danger. It is in the intervention of the so-called artificial intelligence. It does not change the work of real journalists, who, since the existence of this profession, work with two components – facts and storytelling. When you tell a story, you change the way of expression, but not its essence, while the power of artificial intelligence is to change this important core, which is worrying because it is a mechanism for creating fake news, the journalist noted.
“The great danger of us failing in our mission as journalists is the intervention of so-called artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a great power – yes, it knows and can do a lot, but it is also the opportunity that fake news steps on,” he said, adding that it is now increasingly difficult to track factuality and the credibility of facts. Even without it being intentional, artificial news can be created that is confusing and at odds with the essence of journalism, Joshi explained.
For two years, PTI has had a department that monitors fake news and verifies the veracity of facts. The headquarters is in the US, but the India department is staffed by real people who partner with the Meta teams. There are many stories published on PTI site which have already been verified. It is interesting that for these two years fake news has increased, but the number of people verifying this information has also increased. In India, there are nearly 15 agencies that purposefully deal with the verification of the truth of the news, this makes it possible to detect the information and to judge more precisely whether it is fake or real news. Years ago, when there were no filters, fake news was much more, the journalist believes.
Veliko Tarnovo is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited, and Bulgarian feasts are the tastiest in the world, said Vijay Joshi. He visited the “Tsarevets” fortress, the “Trapezitsa” fortress, the “Revival and Constituent Assembly” Museum, the church “St. 40 martyrs” and visited the medieval church “St. St. Peter and Paul”. During his visit to Veliko Tarnovo, he was accompanied by translator Zlatna Kostova, head of the “International Activities” team at BTA.
In the book of impressions, he thanked tour guide Petko Petkanski from the Regional History Museum and wrote: “It was a trip back in time, Mr. Petkanski lifted layer after layer of history to transport us to the 12th-14th centuries and to reveal before us the grand glory of time’. During his visit to our country, Vijay Joshi also visited Plovdiv, Kazanlak, the historic Shipka peak, and his stay in the country continues in the following days.