FBC News 
More than 120 media personnel from across the Pacific will convene next week at the Wasawasa Lodge in Savusavu for the 8th Pacific Media Summit.
Held in Fiji after a lapse of 14 years, the event will be co-hosted by the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Fijian Media Association (FMA) and will be opened by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka on September 22.
FMA General Secretary Stanley Simpson says the last time the summit was held in Fiji in 2012, media organisations were living under censorship and some journalists refused to attend.
“The summit in Savusavu celebrates all we have overcome on this ongoing journey and how we can continue to strengthen a democratic blue Pacific,” he said.
Simpson says the main programme in Savusavu covers press freedom, media sustainability, climate and disaster reporting, artificial intelligence and digital innovation, public broadcast funding, independence, and inclusive media leadership.
He says they are deliberately taking the region’s biggest media gathering out of Suva and into Vanua Levu, closer to some of the communities newsrooms struggle hardest to serve, and discuss how AI and digital innovation, while posing challenges, can also offer solutions.
Simpson says Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica will represent the Fiji Government on the summit’s opening High-Level Panel on September 23.
