CTK IT director Jan Kodera gets European Alliance of News Agencies' quality award

The European Alliance of News Agencies has decided to give Mr Jan Kodera, IT Director at Czech news agency CTK, the 2009 EANA Award for Excellence in News Agency Quality. He gets the prize for his leading role in the design, development and deployment of a new CTK multimedia editorial system called MRS.

The EANA Bureau (board), which is also the jury for the Award said that:

"Multimedia is a key word for news agencies developing new services for media markets offering citizens news and other editorial content via a variety of platforms based the fast development of the information technology.

For the adequate production of multimedia services, access to an efficient editorial system is essential. The editorial system must be flexible and robust for text, photo, infographics, audio, multimedia packages etc. And - it must be based on the way journalists work.

The CTK team headed by IT Director Jan Kodera has developed an editorial system called MRS that is not only to the benefit of the Czech news agency but that is transferable internationally as it works with any Latin alphabet based language. Jan Kodera and his team have thereby contributed an editorial technical solution that can be to the benefit of the international news agency community."

Jan Kodera joined CTK in 1984. His first responsibility was hardware support, programming and maintenance of microcomputers and embedded systems. 1990 - 1992 he worked with adaptation etc of a new technical system for the agency. 1991 - 1996 he served as Chief of the Software and Development Department at the agency.

Since 1996 Mr Kodera is CTK?s Technical Director.

He is a graduate from the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, in Prague.

The prize will be handed over to Mr Kodera by the EANA President, Mr M?ty?s Vince, President of Hungarian news agency MTI, in connection with an EANA conference and Annual General Assembly in Geneva on September 23 - 25, 2009.

For more information:

Please contact EANA's secretary general Erik Nylen, mobile +46 739 865272