TOKYO: The Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA)’s 52nd Executive Board meeting was held here today (March 7), with the focus on balancing dissemination of information and diversifying revenue streams in the wake of fierce competition from social media platforms.
In his remark at the panel discussion themed ‘OANA : News Agencies In the Era of Digital Innovation’, Japan’s Kyodo News Agency President Toru Mizutani said media outlets are facing declining readership as younger generations opted for other contents from social media rather than news.
“We have to change our traditional business model. Our traditional clients like newspapers are facing big drop in advertisement and circulations. Despite many efforts to overcome this, we are not achieving the desired results,” he said.
Serdar Karagoz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Turkey’ Anadolu suggested that news agencies and media outlets harness the AI innovation to enhance their news quality and diversify their revenue stream.
“Use AI for editorial work like headlines, summary and translation. At the same time media companies must look at becoming media technology companies as well,” he said at the meeting held at Kyodo headquarters here.
Stressing that AI can become an important tool for media, Serdar said applications like ChatGPT are nothing without media companies.
“They (AI) collect data, news, archives and reports from us. We (Anadolu) have our own AI and now we have three projects, selling our archives, photos and other products to AI markets,” he said.
Hosted by Kyodo News Agency, the 52nd Executive Board meeting was attended by board members from 14 news agencies, including Malaysian News Agency (Bernama) which was represented by its Chief Executive Officer Nur-ul Afida Kamaludin and Editor-in-Chief Arul Rajoo Durar Raj.
The Executive Board also decided that the next meeting will be hosted by TASS of Russia in Moscow in September.
The organisation will also organise the Best Photography and Best Article about tourism and cultural heritage this year.
Established in 1961 on Unesco’s initiative, OANA brings together 42 news agencies from 35 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and its members are responsible for two-thirds of information circulated throughout the world.
Source: New Straits Times
