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The first World Media Summit (WMS) Global Awards for Excellence highlighted the tasks and challenges facing new media in covering global hot issues, said Laura Lesevre, responsible for a war-reportage crowd-funding project of the Italian website ilGiornale.it.
The WMS awards announced Monday in Beijing encouraged new media to meet pressing challenges, she said told Xinhua in a recent interview.
"For example, our newspaper accepted the challenge to ask citizens to fund war reportage. Many people thought it would be impossible, but we succeeded," she said.
"I was very surprised by the great attention paid to reportage featuring important social themes worldwide," said Lesevre, referring to the participation of her website, the online version of Italian newspaper il Giornale, in the race for the WMS Global Awards for Excellence 2014.
The WMS especially valued media products about central but often unknown issues in developing countries that are facing intense development and numerous challenges, she noted.
Xinhua News Agency, one of the WMS co-initiators and co-founders among other world leading news organizations, has not only appraised the "social responsibilities" that all media should shoulder, but also shown how new media, especially those in developing countries, can further help "bring to light social issues and analyze them from angles that are often neglected by the mainstream information," she stressed.
"We did not win (the awards), but we feel proud of having become part of such a great project which has brought a breath of air in the news world," she said.
Andrea Pontini, CEO of ilGiornale.it, said new media, also thanks to their reduced costs, provide additional channels for the Western world to know in a direct line what is happening in the rest of the planet, and for developing countries to make their voices heard globally.
"The Western world often lives on unacceptable commonplaces about the less developed countries. The fact that just with a few resources we can now get live information about what really happens in the world is extraordinary," he told Xinhua.
Pontini noted that once journalists necessarily had to be on-the-spot in order to see what was happening. "Today a local citizen is able, thanks to a smart phone, to show what is happening at that exact moment. This is a really amazing opportunity for information spreading," he said.
In his view, new media will not replace traditional ones. On the contrary, the two are destined to be increasingly complementary, with traditional journalism supporting the role of new media as an "interpreter and analyzer" of facts.
"I believe that China is a great country from all points of view, despite its many contradictions which are physiological in periods of big transformation," Pontini emphasized, "I was very positively surprised by the WMS, an umpteenth clear sign of China's openness to the external world."
"The fact that an international news awards focused on the spirit of innovation and the social responsibilities of journalism was launched by Xinhua News Agency helps to overcome commonplaces and fills the mankind with hope," he stated.
The first-ever WMS Global Awards for Excellence were announced on Monday in Beijing, attracting extensive attention.
The awards are the first comprehensive news awards covering multiple media formats, including press, photo, video and integrated media.
Designed to become an authoritative, credible and globally influential news showcase, the awards are open to news agencies, newspapers, TV stations and news websites around the world.
