  In order to reveal possible mass shifts of the vector mesons in a dense
strongly interacting medium presumably created in high energy heavy ion
collisions it is necessary to know their free masses reliably. The rho(770)
mass quoted in the last two editions of the Review of Particle Physics is
significantly larger than the values quoted in previous editions. The new value
is mostly influenced by the results of recent experiments CMD-2 and SND at the
VEPP-2M e+e- collider at Novosibirsk. We show that the values of the mass and
width of the rho(770) meson measured in the e+e- -> pi+pi- annihilation depend
crucially on the parametrization used for the pion form factor. We propose a
parametrization of the rho(770) contribution to the pion form factor based on
the running mass calculated from a single-subtracted dispersion relation and
compare it with the parametrization based on the formula of Gounaris and
Sakurai used recently by the CMD-2 collaboration. We show that our
parametrization gives equally good or better fits when applied to the data of
the CMD-2, SND, and KLOE collaborations, but yields much smaller values of the
rho(770) mass, consistent with the photoproduction and hadronic reactions
results. Our fit to the KLOE data becomes exceptionally excellent (confidence
level of 99.88%) if an energy shift of about 2 MeV in the rho-omega region is
allowed.
