Key tendencies and new challenges in media sphere will be on the agenda of the XIII World Congress of Russian Press, which opens on Wednesday.
About 300 delegates from 61 countries representing printed media, television, radio, and information agencies of the Russian-language media big family will participate in the event. The opening ceremony will feature heads of presidential administrations of Russia and Ukraine Sergei Naryshkin and Sergei Levochkin, Itar-Tass Director General and President of the World Association of Russian Press Vitaly Ignatenko.
The leading topic of the session is called World’s Russian Information Space: Great Traditions and New Challenges of the XXI Century.
Kiev hosts the even for the second time. The first congress was organised in June 1999 in Moscow and Sochi and made a decision to organise the World Association of Russian Press /WARP/. The Russian Institute of Press and other congress participants became the associations’ founders. In 2001, the third congress was organised in Kiev. It adopted several programmes to develop united Russian information space. Ten years later ancient Kiev again unites a big audience. Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich suggested hosting the congress in Ukraine. After the session in the capital of the country, the delegates will move to Odessa, where they will continue discussions of vital tasks for the unique media community, which is united not by ideology or policies, it is united by great Russian culture and the Russian language.
The WARP reports that Russian-language newspapers, magazines, publishers, radio and television channels work in almost80 countries worldwide. Most of them are represented in the association or cooperate with it. The biggest calibre of Russian-language media is in Ukraine. Despite the earlier five-year period of forced use of the Ukrainian language among the Russian speaking population, media in the Russian language media’s turnover is about 32 million copies.
The session will award Russia’s letters of commendation to the Russian service of the Radio Prague, to newspapers the Litovskiy Kurier, to Russian-language newspapers published in Germany, Hungary and Ireland. The WARP has introduced a prize named after Yakov Borovoy /a prominent Itar-Tass journalist, who died prematurely/, which is called For Personal Input in Development of Russian Media. A veteran of Russian journalism in Georgia Mark Ryvkin will become the first laureate of the prize.
Echo Newspaper Chief Editor Rauf Talishinski, Yeni Azərbaycan Newspaper Chief Editor Hikmet Bataoglu, SƏS Newspaper Chief Editor Bahruz Guliyev, Trend News Agency CEO Ilgar Huseynov, Trend News Agency Deputy Director General Pasha Kesamanski, Olaylar Newspaper Chief Editor Yunus Oguz and others represent Azerbaijan at the event.