The annual meeting of the association of leading Asia-Pacific news agencies has been inaugurated in the Iranian capital on September 3 with managing directors and deputy heads of member news agencies in attendance.
Speakers include Iranian Minister of Culture Abbas Salehi, IRIB CEO Seyed Zia Hashemi, and head of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA), who is the future president of News Agencies World Congress. OANA president Aslan Aslanov will also deliver a speech and present a report to the participants at the meeting.
The summit, hosted by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), is bringing together directors and senior managers of news agencies from Russia, Azerbaijan, China, Qatar, Turkey, Oman, Mongolia, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bulgaria as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran who will be represented by Mehr News Agency (MNA) and IRNA.
Majority of participating news agencies are among members of the Executive Board of OANA while some will take part at Tehran summit as observers and guests.
Backed by UNESCO, the Asia-Pacific News Agency was founded in 1961 with the aim of facilitating information exchange between countries of the region, and it now comprises 44 news agencies from 35 Asian and Pacific countries.
The sixteenth general assembly of OANA was held in November 2016 in Baku where Azerbaijan was elected to the presidency of the organization. South Korea is scheduled to be the next president of OANA.
OANA Executive Board presently includes AZERTAC (Azerbaijan), TASS (Russia), Xinhua (China), Yonhap (R. of Korea) as well as Anadolu Agency (Turkey).
Other executive board members are IRNA (Iran), BNA (Bahrain), Kyodo News (Japan), NNA (Lebanon), AAP (Australia), Bernama (Malaysia), VNA (Vietnam) as well as PTI (India).
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