As people are watching streamed video on mobile phones and computers and searching Google through their TV sets, delegates to the World Media Summit in Beijing are discussing how traditional media can meet challenges of digital and internet technologies.

The new technologies have changed the traditional ways of news gathering, sorting, editing and conveying it to the audience. They have also produced the slide for broadcast and newspaper.

The World Wide Web brought opportunities and threats to Prensa Latina, which compelled us to drastically reduce the cost of communications and increased the reach and resonance of the message, said Frank Gonzalez Garcia, President of Prensa Latina.

It also modified the routine of production, the professional culture of journalists, the relations with audiences and, once more, put to the test our capacity to respond and adapt to the new scenarios and paradigms, he said.

The challenges from the new technologies have forced world-known news organizations such BBC and the Associated Press to invest more on new platforms to go fully multimedia.

"There appears to be no end to the adaptability and imagination of our audiences and we must keep up," said director of the BBC's Global News Richard Jeremy Sambrook.

"Although BBC Global News can boast a record weekly audience figure of 238 million this year, a reliance on radio alone would have given us only 177 million, a drop of six million radio listeners over the last year," he said. "BBC has ceased to broadcast on air and online in 11 languages over the last three years."

BBC host bloggers on its sites, allowing individuals to provide insights in to their lives and even talk to other bloggers who hold different views and perspectives.

"These technologies help us gain a greater understanding of what is going on over a broader canvas and can also break news," Sambrook said.

For Parviz Esmaeili, managing director of the Mehr News Agency and the Tehran Times newspaper, the digital age has brought challenges to freedom of information through the monopoly of information.

"Although the production of news reports is not restricted to a specific group in the digital age, the tools for the dissemination of information are monopolized by a particular group, and giant communications companies exercise great influence on societies," he said.

"The question is how the dissemination of news is controlled by giant networks like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in the United States, and who benefits from it," he said.

The digital media also have caused a change in the method and speed of spreading rumors. Thus the social responsibility of media outlets is to differentiate true information from rumors and to encourage people to make correct judgement, he said.

While talking about the challenges and opportunities from the new technologies, delegates said the traditional media had to give ground to high-tech media but it will not be replaced by it.

"Both types of media will survive since both fill an aspect of human reality that cannot be fully dismissed," said Dr. Ahmet Hadi Adanali with Adadolu Agency. "No matter how developed the technical assessment of the news, we will still need human instinct to judge the accuracy, reliability or sincerity of an information."

"The newspaper would not perish in the next 20 years," said Zhou Shuchun, vice president of Xinhua News Agency. "At least in China, the circulation of newspaper is increasing," he said.

"The circulation of newspaper might decrease, but as a way of life, reading newspaper will remain as long as there are human beings," he said.

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