A decision approving the strategy for digital transformation in journalism until 2025, with a vision towards 2030, has been signed by Tran Hong Ha, the Deputy Prime Minister. The digital transformation of journalism aims to cultivate modern, professional, and ethical press agencies that effectively communicate and advance the goals of the government and the country’s reform efforts.
It will enable the sector to properly perform its role in guiding the public’s opinions and firmly safeguarding information sovereignty in cyberspace. It will also improve readers’ experience, create new revenue sources, and help promote the development of the digital content industry.
By 2030, the objective is for all press agencies to have released their content on digital platforms, with emphasis placed on domestic digital platforms. 90% of agencies should have used concentrated data analytic and processing platforms and applied artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise operations. 100% will have operated in the converged newsroom model and others matching scientific and technological development in the world and produced content in line with digital media trends. The strategy entails that press agencies should aim to maximise their revenue streams, with the goal of having 50% of them increase their revenue by a minimum of 20%.
The government is moving to digitise sectors across the economy following the national strategy on digital transformation. Recently, the Ho Chi Minh City municipal Department of Information and Communications announced plans to fully digitise public services by linking up with the National Public Service Portal in 2023, with a goal of 100% online availability.
As OpenGov Asia reported, the city will also focus on accelerating digital transformation and smart city development. It strives to fully connect with the Ministry of Public Security’s identity authentication and population database systems, as well as the national databases of other ministries and sectors.
The city will work to deploy digital citizenship and adopt unified mobile applications so that people and businesses can use public services anywhere and anytime. The Department also aims to operate five digital platforms to serve management work. It plans to operationalise six specialised information systems of departments and sectors, including electronic health records of the Health Department and land use information of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.
The National Public Service Portal processed over 644,000 payment transactions with a total value of more than VND 279 billion (over US$ 11.8 million) in January. Over 338,000 accounts have been registered, and more than 7.2 million records were synchronised with the portal in the month. Since its debut in December 2019, the portal has provided 4,377 public services online with over 4.3 million registered accounts. The national public service portal provides 14 groups of online payment services, with eight for people and the rest for businesses.
As of February, the portal has attracted over 1.1 billion visits and processed over 8.5 million records online and over 4.6 million online payment transactions worth over VND 3.8 trillion (US$ 161 million). To improve the business environment and national competitiveness in 2023, the government requested the ministries, sectors, and localities to complete national databases and effectively implement the project on developing the application of population database, e-identification, and e-authentication for national digital transformation in 2022-2025 period.