The Federal News Agency (FENA) (the government-owned national news agency of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity), hosted the Spring Conference and the General Assembly of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA) a few days ago (May 11th -13th, 2022).
Once more, we were honored to participate in this annual gathering and welcomed to share our views on flaming issues that the news and journalistic organizations face, deriving from the company’s extensive expertise in designing & providing novel solutions for media organizations, journalists & fact-checkers .
Within this spectrum, Mrs. Evi Varsou, our Media & CMS Solutions Director, gave an insightful keynote speech on methods and tools available for media companies and news agencies to tackle the disinformation phenomena.
How it all started
Since 2018, the EU has focused on disinformation as an evolving challenge, with a high potential to negatively influence democratic processes and societal debates. In fact, all member states acknowledged disinformation’s increasingly adverse effects on society and launched a detailed action plan to fight it. Within this framework, the EU has launched a Code of Practice on Disinformation together with roadmaps for implementation from partners in the private sector.
Athens Technology Center (ATC), the creator of newsasset platform, is one of the private companies actively engaged in this action plan, supporting publishers, news agencies, and other stakeholders of the European media sector by providing national and multinational fact-checking hubs with the appropriate technological means to counter disinformation.
To begin with, ATC supported the establishment of the first European Observatory against disinformation, where, amongst others, a community of more than 100 organizations worked together in collaborative investigations against disinformation three national centers of excellence in Italy, Denmark, and Greece were launched.
ATC’s experience was capitalized further while helping the European Science Media Hub of the European Parliament to monitor cases of disinformation. Moreover, during 2020, ATC became one of the five founding members of EDMO, responsible for the technological infrastructure offered to a community of more than 25 European fact-checking organizations. In fact, 3 of the 8 multi-national EDMO hubs [BeLux, Central Europe (i.e. Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia) and Bulgaria], have also trusted ATC for such issues.
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The time of newsasset plus
Mrs. Varsou chose to end her speech with a “world-first” look into a new, holistic approach to addressing all challenges that contemporary media organizations face. Specifically, the esteemed delegates had the chance to witness key features of newsasset PLUS, the ideal response to issues like
- being flexible, in terms of providing effective task assignment and the ability to streamline costs via a SaaS software infrastructure (pay-as-you-go)
- being relevant, by exploiting AI-assisted content aggregation features to timely detect and map trending stories
- being trustworthy, by integrating high end digital fact-checking tools to enable all investigative journalism functions
- being sustainable, by generating new revenue streams with value-adding services.
News & Fact-checking | Exploring new capabilities
Our team was led by Mr. Yannis Kliafas, General Manager, who gladly shared details on the company’s investments in researching use cases of artificial intelligence, machine learning, audio forensics, data analytics, and more to meet the constantly changing demands of the market, such us
- Copyrighting and monetizing content via blockchain
- Enable all sorts of content creators to share their media, while keeping control of their intellectual property rights
- A decentralized network for intelligent, automated, and accessible digital asset management systems, where traditional stakeholders and other media owners can share, enrich, verify, and monetize multimedia content
- Data Journalism & Storytelling
- Enhanced data analytics solution to enable journalists to extract facts and insights
- Smart digital tools to repurpose and enrich images for immersive storytelling
- Video content production tools
- An integrated software platform to allow video collection from multiple sources, along with the recognition and automated annotation of a particular segment of each video
- Fighting deepfakes by using state-of-the-art audio forensics technologies to detect audio tampering in videos.