Hungarian state news service MTI Zrt (MTI) is planning to offer video news feeds and to lay off employees as its revenue stream from traditional sources declines, company president Mátyás Vince said in a recent interview with Napi Gazdaság.
Vince said that next year MTI will expand its portfolio of services with video news, created mainly for online news portals. He also said MTI has been expecting lowering revenues for a few years, despite ongoing growth in the number of its clients its serves, mainly online publishers.
Vince has been leading MTI since 2002. Before his reelection for another five-year term in 2007, he wrote that he would like to see a “smaller but more efficient” team at MTI by the end of his new term. While he would not reveal how many employees would be laid off, he said that over half of MTI’s 370 employees were journalists, which he said was excessive compared to the “absorptive capacity of the market.”
Vince also said he would offer more news from the countryside and from areas across the country’s borders inhabited by ethnic Hungarians, for which new employees will be needed.