There is considerable progress in the field of media’s activity with the original sources in Azerbaijan compared to previous years. “Under the financial support of the Media Development State Support Fund under the Azerbaijani President, the Zardabi Press Center held a round table discussion on “The situation in receiving information from the source in Azerbaijan: problems and solutions” within the project on “Getting information from the source: monitoring of existing trends and support of professionalism”, the Zardabi Press Center told Trend News.

The project aims to monitor the field of obtaining information from the source in Azerbaijan. “We periodically familiarize the local and foreign media with the results of monitoring, encourage journalists to obtain information from the source and make efforts to deepen their knowledge,” the head of the center, Rahim Huseynzade said.

He said the project monitored 22 newspapers, eight news agencies and news portals. When selecting the media we considered the impact of media on public opinion and its formation. “Compared to previous years, there is considerable progress in the field of media’s activity with the original. But there are still some problems. They include news articles, based on firsthand information, but published with comments. In this case, a reader cannot define the essence of the written material. Some of the media organizations are dominated by the trend of presenting the author’s position as the news,” said Huseynzade.

Percentage of using other media’s materials by the country’s leading media is high, especially in the newspapers, said the chairman of the center. “This testifies with a low level of self-creation and individual production of news. A high rate of obtaining first-hand information is recorded in news agencies and news portals,” said Huseynzade.

More than 4,000 media outlets were registered in Azerbaijan. Currently only 600 of them function. Nearly 400 newspapers and magazines are published and more than 20 television channels function. There are about 50 electronic media outlets, 20 news agencies, and the rest are the Internet resources in Azerbaijan.