RTL Group | Brussels, 03/06/2017

A Glimpse into the Future of News

More than 60 delegates from the Enex  partner base gathered for the annual Coordinators Meeting in Brussels in February. The RTL Group subsidiary is an alliance of large TV channels worldwide that share news content and resources. At the annual meeting – this year, the Belgian RTL Group channel RTL-TVI hosted the event – the partners took a glimpse into the future in various discussion rounds and examined how news journalism, new technology and government intervention might shape how news journalists work in the coming months and years.

Among other issues, mobile journalism was placed in the spotlight as participants of the French channel BFM talked about how their new Paris-based news channel uses only iPhones for all of their picture gathering and live reporting. The BFM delegates demonstrated an app for editing the pictures generated in this way on the fly.

Investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who was interviewed live via Skype, shared her powerful story of blackmail and imprisonment by the Azerbaijaini government as they sought to clamp down on freedom of the press. Several editors from the Enex partner group joined in with their first-hand experiences of governments placing restrictions on the media.

Adrian Wells, Enex's Managing Director, gave partners a glimpse of Enex's own future, including its recent harnessing of watermarking technology for the protection of content. Wells positively summed up this year's Coordinators Meeting: "The meeting was a testament to the work of our partners at the cutting edge of new technology and practices in the industry. It is largely thanks to their strength that Enex is the considerable editorial force it is today."