Making news

OANA 44: news agencies optimise modern technology in information supply

Members of the Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) have shared their experience, particularly the use of up-to-date technology, in addressing challenges facing modern press, on the occasion of the 44th OANA Executive Board Meeting in Hanoi from April 18-20.

According to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) of Iran, in response to the latest trends among the audience and taking technological developments into consideration, IRNA has increased its active engagement in the web and social networks through its multimedia services.

From April 2018 to March 2019, in a period of 11 months, the agency has published 125,208 photo frames, including both photo reports and images that are attached to news articles.

IRNA published 2,881 videos in the same period. The videos have been posted both on IRNA official website and on Aparat—an Iranian video sharing site like Youtube.

During that period of time, IRNA also published 294 infographics and 574 audio reports.

IRNA Persian page on Instagram has 155,000 followers. This number is remarkable since Associate Press and AFP have 342,000 and 439,000 followers on Instagram respectively.

Furthermore, IRNA releases the latest news through Twitter and the Iranian network of Soroush.

At the same time, IRNA produces long reports, essays and news bulletins for its specific audience groups. In short, IRNA tries to address the needs of different groups of society via a vast range of products. 

Meanwhile, the Montsame News Agency of Mongolia said to cope with the shift of new content consumption behavior, focusing on video content and YouTube platform, the agency has successfully broadcasted news content through Twitter and Facebook platforms as from September 2017.
Noting that the main criterion for broadcasting information using YouTube.com platform is speed, especially in breaking news, and quality issues, the agency stressed the importance of increasing breaking news and video news. Video news are taken from the original source and there will be no chance to be fake. And it would help to solve such issues as fake news and verified news, and how to win back trust of costumers who often trust basic information, the agency said.  

To consolidate the position of the OANA member agencies in the global news network, the agency suggested improving the usage of the OANA’s website, increasing the supply of video news to OANA websites, and paying attention to developing Facebook and Twitter pages.

China’s Xinhua News Agency pointed out that from the world perspective, it’s getting increasingly obvious that the news audience have been moving to the internet, especially mobile internet, with the number of global internet users breaching 4 billion.

Sun Yong, President of Xinhua’s Asia-Pacific Bureau, said the agency has been working hard to innovate their news products, changing from mainly serving traditional media to various types of users and their different needs.

It has rolled out different services for new media and short video media, and increased mobile, visual, intelligent and digital products and so on. Currently, Xinhua produces an average of 100 short videos every day.

The agency builds technological construction as its core competitive power, and now has a technology team of nearly 1,000 people.

It has established an all-media reporting, editing and releasing platform, combining multiple functions together including planning, news gathering, manufacturing, feed back analysis, and data statistics. The platform is now being used throughout the agency.

Xinhua has also built an open news live broadcast “Cloud Platform”. Now more than 3,100 Chinese media organizations have joined the platform, and the agency conducts nearly 400 live broadcasts of various kinds every day.

Sun Yong said the agency has cooperated with China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba and set up a new media technology company, and launched a “Media Brain” platform, the first-of-its-kind in China that brings cloud computing, the Internet of Things, Big Data and AI technology into news production.

On the platform, the news gathering, production and distribution of a video are completely undertaken by machines, and the whole process only takes a few seconds, he said.
VNA/VNP


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