New Chair attends first Asiavision meeting

The new Chair of the ABU News Group has highlighted the geographic representation of the new News Group committee.

In July, the News Group elected Ahmet Görmez from TRT Türkiye as chair, along with two Vice-chairs – Fumitaka Sato from NHK Japan and Nesryn Bouziane from ABC Australia.

During an online editorial meeting with Asiavision members, Ahmet, said “we have a really good team”.

He highlighted the benefit of the geographically diverse News Group committee, stating, “We are actually working from three different corners of the triangle right now, Australia, Japan and Türkiye.”

Meanwhile, Deborah Steele, Director of News at ABU noted important changes made to the Asiavision Rules at the News Group meeting in July. “The two changes we made were to Article Seven, section two. The first one is that members must not imply that a story on Asiavision represents the view of the source organization or its staff. The other one is the right of members to withdraw use of a story.”

The meeting also provided download analytics from Asiavision’s new Asia-Pacific View (APV) platform, which Afruh Rasheed, Senior News Editor at Asiavision presented.

He shared that content providers with the most downloaded items include NHK, CCTV, KBS, MCOT and TRT. The top downloads in July include stories on the Nepal plane crash, extreme weather events, and updates from Gaza; in August, the Japan earthquake, change of government in Thailand, and political turmoil in Bangladesh.