IPS Wire Service Set to Launch WebTV Next Year

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jun 26 2012 (IPS) - RIO DE JANEIRO, 24 Jun (Terra Viva) – After nearly 50 years as an international wire service, the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) is branching out into WebTV keeping pace with advances in digital technology.

Utilizing its current resources and manpower, the new IPSTV will draw on more than 400 journalists in 140 countries, many of them with substantial expertise already in the visual media, according to IPS Director-General Mario Lubetkin.

The pilot phase will be launched in early 2013 with daily broadcasts through the web originating from its studios in Rome.

Lubetkin told Terra Viva the IPS network of journalists, mostly from or based in the global South, will bring a new visual dimension to reporting on issues relating primarily to development, rights, energy, food, civil society, gender empowerment, the environment – and the growing emergence of the South on the multicultural world stage.

“IPSTV will be much more than a visual cousin of the print product,”Lubetkin said.

The formal launch, presided over by the President of the U.N. General Assembly Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, took place on the sidelines of the Rio+20 summit of world leaders here last week.

“I am confident that the IPS Web TV – that we are launching today – would contribute in a meaningful way towards advancing our continuing efforts for global solidarity and cooperation to a higher and more mutually beneficial level,” he said in his opening remarks.

Al-Nasser said:”I do not have to recount the dramatic developments that have taken place in the tools of communication over the last decades. From the mobile phone to the internet and satellite television, the communication revolution is changing the way we generate, disseminate, store, share, process, absorb and utilize information. Now, by visualizing information, web-television is exploring new frontiers.”

Paying a tribute to the wire service, the General Assembly president said that IPS has traditionally been a leading news source in covering areas and issues that feature on multilateral agenda.

With its coverage from 140 countries and reporting in as many as 21 languages, IPS is truly a global news agency.

“I am especially delighted to find that the wide-ranging Generally Assembly issues are covered by IPS regularly under the areas of sustainable development, women, youth, the Culture of Peace, Millennium Development Goals, Alliance of Civilizations and civil society,” he added.

“The new challenge that IPS has taken upon itself through today’s launch of its Web TV – advancing from a basically print media to online moving images – is remarkable.”

He said this will bring a new visual dimension, prestige and credibility to its reporting of issues and processes beyond the daily news. This can be a new professional contribution by IPS to provide information and knowledge needed in building a critical consciousness around the big challenges facing humanity today.

“IPS should be proud of the fact that it is the only international news agency with a majority of its writers originating from developing countries and based in the South. IPS provides a model worth emulating”, the GA president pointed out.

As a media institution primarily focusing on development issues and providing a perspective of the South, it is making a major contribution towards presenting a balanced view with diversity of perspectives and highlighting the needs of the most vulnerable in the global agenda. Significantly and importantly, it is doing this while maintaining its credibility as a news organisation, he added.