The world's leading media giants will gather at a summit here later this week to discuss their challenges in the 21st century.
With the theme of "Global Media: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century," the second World Media Summit, will open Thursday.
Vitaly Ignatenko, director general of Russia's Itar-Tass news agency and co-chairman of the summit, told Xinhua the summit would offer all participants a rare chance to exchange ideas on media challenges in the young century.
The three-day summit will explore the transformation of traditional media under pressure from new media and the Internet, media survival models in the current economic crisis, journalistic ethics in a hyper-dynamic world, and cooperation between media organizations, businesses and governments, Ignatenko said.
The media summit had proved to be the best platform to tackle the most important issues of the global media environment, and to voice timely responses to the challenges the modern world produced, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend the Moscow forum and, as the summit's host, Ignatenko hopes the forum can resume the constructive conversation started at the first summit in Beijing.
The summit was initiated in 2009 by nine leading media organizations, including the Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Google, Itar-Tass, Kyodo News, News Corporation, Thomson Reuters, Turner Broadcasting System and Xinhua, and was attended by about 300 representatives from more than 170 international media outlets.
Al Jazeera and the New York Times joined the summit's presidium in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
The summit mechanism has been praised by the United Nations, UNESCO and media leaders around the world.
