site.btaForum Discusses Ethnic Communities Media in Bulgaria

Researchers and journalists took part in a round table on "Media of ethnic communities - chronicler of time" at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication of the Sofia University on Tuesday.
The event is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the "Jewish News" newspaper, as well as the state of the media of ethnic communities in the country.

“We are celebrating the anniversary of one of the most prestigious printed publications in Bulgaria, related to an ethnic community that for centuries has been building Bulgarian everyday life and holidays, and our common cultural horizons, said at the opening,” Prof. Ventsislav Dimov.

According to the executive director of the organization of Jews in Bulgaria "Shalom" Maxim Delchev, "the topic of media of ethnic communities in Bulgaria is not a niche. It is not, as many people think, some crossing point between journalism and ethnography and these media, and the problems they face, are not just a beautiful and colorful look at the diversity of Bulgarian society," said Maxim Delchev. In his words, the anniversary of the newspaper "Jewish News" is indicative of the fact that these media have a role in the integration of ethnic communities in Bulgarian society.

Editor-in-chief Mihaylina Pavlova said that a long time ago there was a meeting between all the editors-in-chief of ethnic newspapers that were published in Bulgaria. "From this point of view, our meeting today seems a bit sad. The print editions of the ethnic minority groups in Bulgaria are very few. And the times are different," she said. According to her, answers are needed to the questions of why it has happened that ethnic media outlets do not exist and why the state has neglected them for years.

Ivanka Gezenko of the "Archives" state agency made reference to the world media meetings organized annually by the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). In her words, the BTA aims to build a media environment outside Bulgaria, and the topics of the meetings are often related to Bulgarian identity abroad. The role of these ethnic newspapers and magazines in Bulgaria is to preserve the foreign identity in Bulgaria, to preserve the identity of the other next to us, Gezenko said.

According to Assoc. Prof. Orlin Spasov, the Bulgarian public media do not have a comprehensive diversity policy. There are some rather fragmented principles for self-regulation. He said that data from 2023 shows that the two leading private TV stations are dominated primarily by interest in migrants, Ukrainians, followed by Roma and LGBT communities, but Jews, Armenians and Bulgarian Muslims are covered extremely rarely.