( AFP ) - The future looks bright for news agencies as long as they are ready to adapt to new technologies and a market that is constantly evolving, the World Congress of News Agencies heard Friday.
Representatives of some 100 national and international news agencies met in in the southern coastal town of Estepona for the three-day congress that ended Friday.
Despite the turbulence and confusion in the market for news agencies, they remained "the backbone of the world information system," Claude Erbsen, a consultant with media advisory group Innovation, told the conference.
The traditional market for newspapers continued to evolve and new publications, such as free dailies, represented the "ideal clients" for news agencies, said Erbsen, a former vice president of Associated Press.
Daily newspapers, which in the United States are cutting their staff and their foreign bureaus, needed news agencies more than ever as their primary sources of "credible" information, he added.
The emergence of the Internet over the past 12 years was the "best thing that ever happened to the business of news agencies," because it opened new and varied markets.
The rapid development of mobile phones offered even greater opportunities, said Marcel Fenez, a media specialist with Price Waterhouse.
But if agencies wanted to take advantage, agencies still had to "change and react" to adapt to new technologies, multimedia and the growing importance of videos and pictures, he said.
Anyone seeking information on the Internet spends an average of seven minutes at any one site and increasingly tends to "bypass the text," said Simon Gunthet, the head of the British branch of the Italian group Tiscali.
"They want more pictures and more and more videos," he said.
A number of international news agencies, including Agence France-Presse (AFP), have recently expanded their video departments.
To adapt to the new markets, agencies "must blow up the walls of (traditional) newsroom departments" and set up new integrated multimedia offices, said Erbsen.
The question of access to information, which is becoming increasingly restricted for some sporting events, was also raised at the conference.
Alain Leiblang, in charge of communications for the International Football Federation (FIFA), stressed that "freedom of information" was not the same thing as "commercial freedom."
Agencies that produced more videos had to be clear about their needs, especially for the next football World Cup in South Africa in 2010, because they were coming to a market in which the big television networks pay huge sums to broadcast matches.
This problem of media access to sporting events was most recently illustrated by a dispute between news agencies and the organisers of the recent rugby world cup in France.