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- Information and communication in the areas of South Europe.

- This was the theme of a symposium held in Cogolin in the Var, between some information professionals.

- The managers of FR3 Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur of course participated to this symposium.

- Corsica, Languedoc Roussillon, Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrénées and Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur,

- that is to say 5 major French areas, just as many Italian and Spanish ones are represented,

- also with Portuguese and Greek participants,

- all of them professionals, who were not in Cogolin for a leisure encounter

- but to define needs.

- We must become aware

- to manage to recover our Mediterranean cultures, we must become aware,

- and we reckon that we must become aware first through information.

- The symposium now held in Cogolin has the exact aim to allow this communication of information within the Mediterranean regions.

- The exact purpose, is first of all the possibility to share all the information riches

- that exists at the level of the regions that form the Mediterranean

- on the one hand, at the level of the information makers all over the Mediterranean,

- to enable us to place this information is a sort of common pot

- that must then be used to feed the various information receptors and broadcasters all around our basin.

- The creation of a body that may, in particular, work as a data base

- that indicates to every media what is being done here and there, this body that may be at the same time an exchange council,

- which is the great idea issued in Cogolin.

- Though the idea is seducing, technical and legal issues do not allow a very quick setting of such a body.

- That is the reason why Paul Lanteri, FR3 regional manager proposed that, first, the encounters were held on regular

- and alternate basis in every country. And besides the exchanges of ideas,

- those encounters could also be friendly confrontations for local programs,

- reports, information magazines and variety shows.

- This solution would deserve a main credit, that of giving an answer to requirements.

- The widespread desire of the regions is to proceed to mutual exchanges, reciprocal,

- without going through the very heavy structures that are the international TV structures.

- I believe that this experience is a very important step forward to identify every region and even nationalities such as in Spain,

- and to assert the regions against centralism, central power.

- For the time being, it is only a matter of exchanges. And it is not the time for the promotion of a regional IMTP spread to written press

- with all the trade features that are known in Cannes.

- Let’s say that this type of encounters is a lot of interest only for professionals. Cogolin has already applied to host its possible delegates.

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- Cogolin gives its entire hospitality to any Mediterranean encounter that asserts the features and the identity of the South,

- so all the more of the communication and information encounters that might be held in Cogolin on yearly basis.