14 Nov 2019

Imagine a world without news agencies or wire services. News agencies are the “eyes and ears” of many nations.

News agencies circulate information from one country to another, gather news all around the world that newspapers could not afford individually, work as a supplier of news, mainly foreign news to media and in most cases there are the first to report breaking news.

Despite a number of news agencies in the world, most news printed and broadcast throughout the world each day comes from three dominant agencies, the Associated Press in the United States, Reuters of United Kingdom and Agence France Presse of France.

In the developing world, the Press Trust of India, Xinhua news agency of China and to a certain extend the South African Press Agency (SAPA) are gradually making their way to the international audience.

The focus here is on Xinhua news agency, the state news agency of the world’s largest developing country. It is the biggest and most influential media organization in China as well as the largest news agency in the world in terms of correspondents worldwide.

Xinhua has 180 overseas branches, including seven regional bureaus and delivers 7000 pieces of news products in the form of texts, photos, graphics, audios and videos in 11 languages.

Recently Xinhua invited its African subscribers to a one-day seminar in Nairobi, Kenya to look at its coverage of China for Africa and to look on how the agency could better cover China for African audience and how to better cover Africa and beyond.

The agency also briefed its African subscribers on its English multimedia service. The service, the first such in English offers exclusive content for news websites and news Apps.

Unlike traditional news feeds, where text stories, photos and videos are separately transferred, the service provides contents ready for publication. The services currently sends out around 70 multimedia stories per day, with an option to increase in case of good circulation.

Speaking at the occasion, the Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Director General of Xinhua (Africa) Mr Wu Zhiqiang said Xinhua’s overseas operations, including those in Africa, have expanded steadily over the past decades.

He said advances in technology and other disruptive factors have posed major challenges to the media industry.

To face up to the challenges, he said Xinhua has taken concurrent measures on multiple fronts in its bid to it into a modern, top-notch international wire service, utilizing technologies such as machine-learning, big data, virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as 5G transmission. Xinhua’s English Multimedia wire-service has been one of such measures, he said.

Mr Wu further said the new service has greatly streamlined content creation process, further improving the integration of all media elements.

He said as the state news agency, its wish is to continue working hand in hand with media counterparts in the world’s largest developing continent by presenting “a fuller, richer, objective coverage of Africa and African affairs, and in so doing, countering the sometimes one-sided, stereotypical and condescending coverage by some media outlets, fully reflecting the aspirations and concerns and upholding the interests of the vast developing world.”

Mr Wu said despite headwinds against globalization and multilateralism, Africa is on track to build the world’s largest free trade zone, the African Continental Free Trade Area and to realize its potentials and goals as defined in Agenda 2063.

The seminar was attended by more than 40 delegates from 34 media outlets of 15 sub-Saharan countries.

The delegates were thankful to Xinhua for countering western media which tend to report negatively on Africa and appealed to the agency to further increase its footprint in the continent.

They also appealed to Xinhua to consider sponsoring African journalists to attend Chinese universities for them to understand better Chinese culture.

For his part, the Editor of the Botswana Guardian Mr Justice Kavahematui said Xinhua should strive for balanced coverage of African issues. He said as a state owned agency it tends to turn a blind eye to corruption which he said is rampant in most African countries.

That said, news agencies are an important and integral part of news gathering and distribution locally and internationally and as one Chinese media scholar say there are the “eyes and tongue” of nations. The developing world have a starting point – Xinhua has taken a big step. ENDS