ROME, 23 Jul – Inter Press Service (IPS), the international non-profit news agency headquartered in Rome, officially launches its new website this Monday, Jul. 23.

Mario Lubetkin, IPS’s Director General, said that the re-design comes at a time of shifting sands for the media and communication sector.

“One of the current and future big challenges – and opportunities – for IPS is the social media, multimedia and mobile context,” he said. “The new website shows IPS with its usual in-depth and original print news content, but also developing in other areas of communication.”

According to Walter Garcia, IPS’s Multimedia Director, the new platform better integrates IPS’s social media networks, features photos, videos and podcasts more prominently and includes a new blog space.

“For this major redesign we chose an open-source platform for our CMS (Content Management System),” Garcia added, “not only because their ideology reflects exactly what IPS stands for, but because we are talking about high-quality applications that are reliable and scalable.”

Ultimately, the changes to the website are meant to create stronger channels between the agency and its readers – whether to make it easier for them to consume and share IPS’s news or to connect them with others in the IPS community, including writers and editors, “IPS’s goal is to be as close as possible to our readers everywhere,” Associate Editor in Chief Diana Cariboni said.

This goal has changed little in IPS’s history.

“In the  mid-1990’s, at a time when online news was a rarity and other news agencies were strictly closed to the general public, producing news exclusively to sell to media clients, IPS was one of the first international news agencies to move to the web and to open its content to readers,” Cariboni explained.  “Our new site is a natural continuity of that tradition.”

The site overhaul also includes a completely new, cleaner design and an updating of the agency’s main editorial themes.

2012 is an exciting year for IPS, including the announcement of IPS WebTV that will start a pilot phase in 2013. The re-launched news site provides a fresh and flexible platform for engaging with and expanding the IPS community.

Visit, read, share & comment www.ipsnews.net