On December 19, 2023, at its headquarters at 71 Hang Trong Street in Hanoi, Nhan Dan Newspaper officially launched the ‘One Commune, One Product’ (OCOP) informational webpage at https://nhandan.vn/ocop/. The informational webpage continues to realise Nhan Dan Newspaper's digital transformation strategy by combining information and data with technology and creative ideas, thus contributing to spreading the value, quality and culture of Vietnam’s OCOP products. Thereby, it helps promote and deepen policy communication activities while facilitating the implementation of the OCOP Programme.

According to Le Quoc Minh, Member of the Party Central Committee (PCC), Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper, Deputy Head of the PCC Commission for Communication and Education, and Chairman of the Vietnam Journalists’ Association, the biggest goal of the webpage is to build a map of OCOP products across Vietnam.

A: OCOP is a very important programme that has been implemented for many years. However, our observations showed that most of the current information is delivered in the form of text, images, television or radio reportages. There is a missing database about OCOP products so that users can look them up and, if necessary, they can participate as investors and coordinators of promotion activities.

In Vietnam, many press agencies do not follow the direction of building data journalism because it requires a substantial investment and a unified database.

In addition to introductory content, detailed information about units and businesses and supporting photo and video systems should be provided. From this reality, Nhan Dan Newspaper decided to build an in-depth website focusing on building a detailed data lookup system for each product.

The informational webpage was planned in early 2023, going through nearly a year with many different stages, from hiring a technology partner to build the website to ensure aesthetics and search logic to building a database of all products. Currently we are trying to update all certified OCOP products, ranging from 3 to 5 stars.

A: As I said earlier, the biggest difficulty is the development of a complete and comprehensive database. In fact, the number of OCOP products in each locality is very large.

Recently, Nhan Dan Newspaper worked with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development as well as localities to proactively provide these units with the details of products in accordance with the Newspaper's data entry standards. This process certainly takes a lot of time and requires the support of many stakeholders. However, we believe that if the localities are clearly aware of the effectiveness and proactively enter data, the promotion and introduction of OCOP products will certainly be widespread, especially as the website is hosted by Nhan Dan Newspaper, a very reputable press agency.

The webpage is designed to be friendly, modern, easy to use, and convenient to search. This product is also a collection of diverse and official data information about the OCOP Programme and products of localities. In addition, it will become a place to introduce good practices and effective OCOP models as well as a forum for policy criticism to solve difficulties for subjects and suggest potentials for localities’ cooperation and development of OCOP products, thus contributing to promoting and spreading the meaning of the OCOP Programme throughout the community, helping readers gain a new perspective on this meaningful programme.

A: The main goal of the OCOP special section is to create a map of OCOP products in Vietnam so that consumers can look up full information on any product when needed.

Another goal is to support OCOP owners to do business more effectively, instead of using conventional business methods, thereby helping them increase revenues and profits.

Currently, some OCOP owners have been employing various measures to bring their products to major supermarkets and restaurants, while many others still don’t even know how to advertise their products in the domestic market, let alone foreign markets. Therefore, we are working to help these owners bring their products to digital platforms. It is a great benefit that it is not easy for functional agencies nor the media to support.

A: In fact, if the content of news articles only stops at macro information dissemination, it will often fail to touch the emotions and hearts of readers.
Therefore, when implementing the OCOP webpage, Nhan Dan Newspaper reporters from all regions will directly come and meet with OCOP subjects to listen to their stories, from simple to local strategic vision. Then, these stories will be “retold” to readers in creative forms such as combining images/videos and graphics to attract viewers. This is also a very important part of the content of the OCOP webpage of Nhan Dan Newspaper.

Nhan Dan Newspaper’s OCOP webpage has 5 subsections: News; products; development stories; Q/A; Multimedia. The content of the webpage is a combination of press information and data information, creating a multi-dimensional and multi-colour OCOP webpage, not only serving product search but also helping look up in-depth data, and helping people learn experiences and solutions in the process of building and developing OCOP products. Readers will also see stories told by the subjects of OCOP products in all parts of the country in the most honest, intimate and vivid way.

Published: December 2023
Production manager: HONG VAN
Content: SON BACH
Photos: THANH DAT
Design: DUONG DUONG, VU HAI