PINA battens down the hatches...

Well, well, well. Lookey, look what we have here.

The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) fights for their survival and thinks that they can hold their service of PACNEWS to ransom. There ain't no rocket science about PACNEWS -- its mostly constituted lazily from daily Google News Alerts anyway.

What's more they "bind" together hoping that they could field Stanley Simpson (who is not mainstream media) as a contender for the Presidency.

Did you also notice that only the military supporter newsrooms covered the issue?

We've got our eye's on you PINA.

PINA Secretariat to stay in Fiji
Thursday, July 30, 2009

PINA chief executive officer Matai Akoula says if the secretariat is to be relocated then its news bulletin – PACNEWS should also be moved from Fiji too.

There has been wide support to let the Pacific Islands News Association secretariat to remain in Fiji.

This was confirmed at the PINA annual general meeting held in Vanuatu yesterday where the motion came from the Cook Islands and seconded by Papua New Guinea.

The re-location of the PINA Secretariat from Fiji became an issue following the censorship of the Fiji media by the Fiji Government.

Apart from this, PINA chief executive officer Matai Akoula says if the secretariat is to be relocated then its news bulletin – PACNEWS should also be moved from Fiji too.

Akoula says this should be done because by dividing the two will only let old rivalry come to the fore again.

Meanwhile Moses Stevens has been elected the new Pacific Islands News Association president.

Stevens who is from Vanuatu was elected ahead of Fiji’s Stanley Simpson.

Stevens will now lead the pacific region’s biggest collective organisation for media practitioners.

Stevens is the publisher of the Ni-Vanuatu newspaper and was the deputy of PINA’s PACNEWS bulletin in the 1990s before the PINA secretariat was re-located to Fiji.

He replaces Joseph Ealedona who did to seek re-election as PINA president at yesterday’s AGM.

After his election, Stevens wants all media organisations from Polynesian and Melanesian countries to work together in taking PINA forward.

John Woods from the Cook Islands was elected as vice-president.

One highlight of the PINA AGM was the direction in which members want the organisation to move into the future and embrace all the changes affecting traditional media organizations.

Fiji Broadcasting Corporation LTD