Anatolia Agency to broadcast in Kurdish

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç visits a photograph exhibition featuring photos of Anatolia news agency reporters to mark the agency’s 92nd anniversary. AA photo

The Anatolia News Agency is planning to broadcast in Kurdish, its director Kemal Öztürk said yesterday as he announced the agency’s 100th anniversary vision.

Speaking at an event to mark the agency’s 92nd anniversary, board chairman and Director-general Kemal Öztürk said they targeted broadcasts in 11 languages in the future and that Kurdish would be one of these. As part of the ceremony, Öztürk announced the agency’s “Centennial Vision,” according to which it aims to become one of the world’s top five news agencies by 2020, when it officially celebrates its 100th anniversary. He added that public broadcaster TRT had already launched a Kurdish-language television channel.

“We will provide Russian edition services from our office in Baku, and we already launched Bosnian edition services in March,” Öztürk said.

Turkey needs to train war correspondents based on its geographical position, Öztürk said.

“Five Anatolia correspondents were recently sent to London to be trained as war correspondents. We have since decided to train our own war correspondents. Turkey’s Police Academy, General Staff and the Anatolia will sign a protocol soon for the training of war correspondents. We will begin training war correspondents for the Middle East, Balkans and the Caucasus,” Öztürk said.

Anatlia news agency director Öztürk stressed that the agency, which cuurently has 1,121 subscribers, aims to increase this number to 7,000 by 2020, aiming an income of 130 million Turkish Liras.

4,000 stories a day

“We plan to offer 4,000 news on a daily basis. We presently provide 600 photographs per day and we want to increase this figure to 2,500,“ he said. “We aim to increase the number of regional offices in Turkey to 18 from 13 and the number of foreign offices to 80 from 39 in the next eight years.”

Speaking at the same gathering, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç targeted main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, saying that he wore “an ideological shrink jacket and observes things from this perspective.”

Arınç said that some Agency employees had left their trade union and moved to a new one, and that Kılıçdaroğlu had narrowly criticized this situation in his message for the anniversary of the agency. “He criticizes us from an ideological perspective and he has a militant sound. We do not want people wearing an ideological shrink jacket and observing things from this perspective.”