The General Director of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) attended the fourth International Humanitarian Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan, on October 2-4 and delivered a speech on the role of social media at a discussion on October 3.

General Director Nguyen Duc Loi was of the viewpoint that mainstream journalism should utilise social media as an effective tool, together with the support of technology, to spread information further, saying that social media is a rich source of information and themes for the media, and social networks as an interactive channel between the press and readers are changing the conventional working style of the press.

At the same time, the VNA leader emphasised that it is professional and information organisation capacity that is the decisive factor for the survival of professional media. He affirmed that while social media can be competitive in terms of number of users, it is just a source of information. It is the mainstream media that readers put their trust in, he said.

Other topics at the discussion included the role of the media in covering humanitarian problems in the globalisation context and the problems of the 21st century in the context of intercultural and intercivilisational dialogue.

The forum attracted the participation of 500 delegates from 60 countries, who gathered to discuss a series of challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev attended and addressed the opening session. Speakers at the forum included speaker of the Russian Federation Council upper house Valentina Matviyenko and UNDP Administrator Helen Clark.-VNA