It's really important to protect ourselves against misinformation. Misinformation is that thing that disallow us from taking the best decisions for ourselves" underlined Alexandru Ion Giboi, General Secretary of the European Alliance of News Agencies in an interview with Athens-Macedonian News Agency and to journalist Nikos Drossos on the sidelines of the Delphi Economic Forum X. 
  Giboi noted that "what we need to do is look for trustworthy news. We need to verify. We need have a critical eye. We have to be able to interpret what we read, that's very complicated, at least from the public side".
Asked on the scope and the aim of the European Alliance of News Agencies, he said that "Our scope is to... allow news agencies in Europe to function in a healthy business environment. By that, I mean allowing them access to knowledge, allowing them an interface with the European institutions, a voice at the European level, and, you know, sharing best practices".
According to Giboi "Trust with the new news agencies protect democracies through their activity. They don't need to do anything else than be ethical, follow the principles of journalism, and provide trustworthy and accurate news. This is the way news agencies practically help societies, and Europe as a whole, maintain those core values. Free media, free journalism, freedom of speech, are at the basis of the European values. And this is what news agencies, professional, trustworthy news agencies, are doing".
Asked on how AI affect his day-to-day work, Giboi said "It's two sides of this relationship between news agencies and AI. You have the side which implies news agencies using AI to streamline newsroom activities, to move faster. But it's also the other side, which is linked to the relationship between news agency and AI providers, AI big tech companies. And that's troublesome at the moment. It's a moment in which, as I mentioned during the forum, there's a need for more mutual understanding. There's the need for tech companies to understand the value brought by news media for societies, the societies in which they live in, the societies which were brought to this point by quality information, by people who were able to make better decisions".
Finally, asked on "how does the association help its members?" Giboi said that "one practical example is the fact that we organized an event at the European Parliament this Tuesday with the support of Vice President of European Parliament, Victor Negrescu. We had a debate on the challenges and the opportunities for news agencies brought by AI. We looked into the future a bit, trying to understand how to move forward in a way that it's constructive because news agencies definitely and the media definitely as a whole is not, we are not against evolution, we are against development. We welcome this because it also helps us in our way of working. But this should be done by paying attention to the ethics, to the principles of journalism, to the principle of copyright and to the principals of not using stuff which is not yours."

The interview is available on  https://youtu.be/hhHH9D1oytw