The news agencies of Vietnam and France on July 20 reached anagreement on prioritising their multimedia cooperation in the future.

Thiswas agreed by Director-General of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) TranMai Huong and his counterpart Emmanuel Hoog of the French news agency,Agence France-Press (AFP) during the former’s working visit to France.

The two newswire services will sign a cooperation agreementand seek to improve the quality of news and photos exchange services, aswell as share professional skills and experiences and management modelsin the future.

Recounting all facets of the VNA-AFP cooperation,the VNA chief spoke highly of the two agencies’ information exchangeservices, noting that their cooperation has contributed to promotingtraditional cooperation and mutual understanding between the Vietnameseand French people.

He underlined the necessity for both newsagencies to expand their bilateral cooperation in multimedia services,such as providing information products to mobile phones and other moderncommunication tools.

Huong informed the AFP officials about theVNA’s launch of its own TV channel, Vnews, on a trial basis since lateJune and expressed wishes to step up cooperation with AFP in the field.

Heinvited the AFP Director General to visit Vietnam for the signingof the two agencies’ cooperation agreement.

The AFP chief said hewas happy to see fruits in the VNA-AFP partnership in recent times.

Hestressed that all newswire services are facing the need to restructuretheir operation models to meet the global demands of rapidly growingmultimedia.

He emphasised the need to focus on developingmultimedia information products as an indispensable trend of moderncommunications, saying his agency plans to triple its multimediainformation products in the next year./.