OANA Executive Board meeting launches in Vietnam

By Erdogan Cagatay Zontur

ANKARA (AA) - The 44th Executive Board Meeting of the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) kicked off in the capital Vietnam on Friday.

Anadolu Agency’s Deputy Director General Mustafa Ozkaya and Marketing and Sales Director Yilmaz Yaman also attended the OANA meeting as a member and vice-president.

"We would like to host OANA's Board of Directors meeting in 2020, when Anadolu Agency will celebrate its 100th anniversary," Ozkaya said at the meeting.

"The board of directors of OANA, of which 44 news agencies from 35 countries are members, stated that they wanted to benefit more from Anadolu Agency's experience in international organization, development, technology and new media applications," Ozkaya added.

Hosted this year by the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) under the theme "For a professional and innovative journalism", the meeting will focus on three topics: strategies responding to changes in information use orienting towards video clips, fake news and fact-checking, and regaining trust for mainstream news.

In his opening speech, VNA General Director Nguyen Duc Loi said people use the internet not only to communicate but also to provide information in "fierce competition" with mainstream news.

"As such, the press not only competes with each other, but also unfairly competes with their own traditional readers who are using social networking platforms to spread information," he added.

He underlined that many users circulated unchecked content on social media to spread " unlimited amounts of unchecked and subjective information with only one click, some with negative intentions of making profits and causing social chaos," whereas mainstream outlets had to work hard to collect and verify the information they published.

He stressed that the co-existence of real and fake information across many communication platforms has made the public lose faith in mainstream news, adding The OANA member news agencies have transformed themselves to better verify information and bring "accurate and humane" news to press agencies and readers.