Deputy Director General of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA), Nguyen Duc Loi, is attending the 33 rd Executive Board Meeting of the Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agency (OANA) which takes place in Ulaanbataar , Mongolia , from June 27-29.

In his welcome speech Prime Minister Suhbaatar Batbold of Mongolia – the host country - affirmed that news agencies have always been playing important role in countries’ histories. Their importance remained unchanged today although the world has been experiencing increasingly fierce information competition.

He also said that informing the world about the achievements and progress of the region, which has been leading the world in terms of the number of its populations, sizes of its territories and speed of development, as well as delivering domestic and foreign news to the people in our own countries, is an honourable and proud duty of OANA journalists.

Opening the meeting, General Director of the Anadolu Agency (AA), Dr. Hilmi Bengi, who is currently holding the Presidency of OANA, said the meeting, under the theme “Content quality improvement of news items disseminated among member countries and Upgrading multi-media news exchange management”, is an opportunity for member agencies to debate how to make OANA more dynamic and effective.

For that purpose, members are requested to focus discussion on the upgrade of the OANA website, enabling member agencies to upload text, photo as well as video information to the site, and the organisation of training programmes for journalists of member agencies in the future.

In his address, VNA Deputy Director General Loi stressed the need to promote the exchange of multi-media products among OANA member agencies so as to enable them to access diversified information sources as well as reduce the production costs to better serve local audiences.

He pledged that with the launching of the English broadcast on the VNA Television Channel (Vnews) in the near future, VNA will play a more active part in multi-media service of OANA to continue carrying out the original objective of the organisation of creating a more free flow of news and information in Asia and the Pacific.

Also on the agenda of the meeting, the participants are to have cordial meetings with the Mongolian Parliament Speaker and the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar.

Over the past five decades of development, OANA now comprises of 42 member agencies from 33 countries in Asia and the Pacific. Exchanged news and information among member agencies is available at http://www.oananews.org . At the proposal of several members, OANA began experimental exchange of multi-media products as of last November./.