VietNamNet Bridge - By 2015, Vietnam will open its press representative offices in 30 countries and territories around the world. This is one of the goals in the draft decision of the Prime Minister approving the master plan on the network of overseas representative offices of Vietnamese news agencies.

The draft decision has been posted on the website of the Ministry of Information and Communications for people's comments.

According to the document, the network of representative offices of Vietnamese news agencies will be established on the basis of taking full advantage of the capacity of the headquarters of Vietnamese diplomatic and cultural missions in foreign countries and the coordination between news agencies to ensure operational efficiency and avoid waste.

The draft document proposes to have permanent offices of Vietnamese news agencies in 30 countries and territories around the world by 2015 and in 32 countries and territories by 2020.

The Government will give priority to setting up permanent offices of Vietnamese news agencies in the key areas of external information.

The news agencies that are allowed to open overseas offices include the Vietnam News Agency, the People's Daily, the Vietnam Television, and the Voice of Vietnam. Among them, the Vietnam News Agency is the key.

The key areas to open representative offices are big countries; the countries that have close political, economic and tourism cooperation with Vietnam; the countries that have strategic partnership with Vietnam; the countries where have big communities of overseas Vietnamese; neighboring countries and Southeast Asian countries.

The new license should ensure the principle that in a country there is only one permanent office of Vietnamese news agencies.

L.Thu