The following is a sample of the full conference summaries provided to WAN members and to subscribers of its Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project.
For more about WAN membership and its benefits, click here.
For more about the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, consultwww.futureofthenewspaper.com.
Involving Everyone in Strategic Planning
Mette Bock, Editor-in-Chief and CEO, Jyske Vestkysten, Denmark
Ms Bock acknowledges that asking everyone on staff, including the receptionists, to participate in the strategy making process is a provocative idea.
"I think a lot of the problems in the newspaper industry is caused by old-fashioned management bound to the ideas of the industrial society," she said.
So when she took the helm at the Danish regional daily Jyske Vestkysten, she had the opportunity to put some new thinking to work.
She called a meeting of all 350 staff members to tell them she would undertake an eight-week process to draft a strategy "that could bring Jyske Vestkysten up to the elite of regional newspapers in Europe." And then she invited them -- all of them -- to participate in the strategy drafting process.
Ten work groups were created and anyone who wanted to join them was invited to do so. There was a huge response. "What surprised me most about the process was the degree of commitment by the staff," she said. "Even receptionists participated in the debate about their future workplace."
The workgroups produced a massive amount of recommendations -- not all of them were incorporated, but senior management focused on those with the highest common denominator.
The key elements of the final strategy were: to create a newsroom that would "locally anchor" the media house, as local content was a competitive advantage; to produce content for the daily newspaper, internet and local radio, which required the company to purchase a station because it did not yet have one; to train the editorial and sales staff in multimedia; and to use portable technology wherever possible.
One advantage of working in this way was that all staff members knew the strategy. "They were part of the process of crafting it," said Ms Bock.
She acknowledged there were some matters that could not be discussed with staff until a decision is made -- a potential merger, for example. Nevertheless, "there are few situations that will not benefit from the comments that staff will provide," she said.
Innovations in Newspapers: the 2003 World Report
Innovations International Media Consulting Group
What are newspaper associations around the world most concerned about? To find out, the Innovation International Media Consulting Group asked 40 association executives from 33 countries to rate the relative importance of 20 issues facing the industry.
After all the numbers were crunched, Innovation’s Juan Senor listed three things that led the list: "Circulation, circulation, and not surprisingly, circulation."
Looking beyond circulation and readership, the executives also said they were interested in ways to improve distribution and advertising sales, and make their Web sites profitable. They saw government regulation and interference as a problem, and worried about a lack of long-term planning and investment.
Strategies for gaining readership - for the printed product as well as newspaper Web sites - figured prominently in the fifth annual study conducted by Innovation for the World Association of Newspapers. The consulting group sketched out the top trends in the newspaper industry in a book titled "Innovations in Newspapers," distributed to 1,200 senior newspaper executives who attended the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Dublin. The book is also being made available to WAN individual members and subscribers to the WAN "Shaping the Future of the Newspaper" project.
During the Congress presentation, Senor and his fellow Innovation consultants focused on a handful of industry trends:
Experiments in convergence: Innovation studied two small news operations in Denmark and Finland that trained their journalists to produce stories for print, radio, TV and the Web with little or no increase in staff.
Ten reporters and five photographers at the Frederikshavn office of the Danish newspaper Nordjyske Stiftstidende cover stories for the newspaper, provide the local radio station with hourly news updates, produce half-hour TV programs and update their news Web site.
At Finland’s Turun Sanomat in Turku, journalists report for the newspaper as well as radio stations and TV. Even the editor-in-chief, Ari Valjakka, picks up a camera to shoot a story about the multimedia operation.
"I am glad to say that the business as a whole is profitable," Valjakka said. In both cases, the journalists start by thinking about the best ways to tell their story, rather than focusing on one medium. The advertising department also is changing its mindset: "We don’t sell millimeters," a Nordjyske executive said. "We sell effects."
Profitable Web sites: Newspapers are increasingly testing the waters of online subscription models, and some of their Web sites are starting to turn substantial profits.
FT.com, for example, has gone to a combination of free and paid-for content. This strategy enabled FT.com to make a profit for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2002 on revenue of 36.5 million euros. NYTimes.com has gone to a strategy of "surround sessions," where a single advertiser controls every major ad position for a number of pages on the Web site. That strategy helped NYTimes.com report an operating profit of $8.3 million in 2002.
Content, content, content: Juan Antonio Giner, a founder of Innovation, said the main focus for transforming a newspaper should be improving the content. Too often, newspapers focus on what happened the day before -- which means the news is already stale by the time it reaches the reader’s doorstep.
Next-generation readership: Innovation highlighted efforts to attract readers in the 18-to-24 age category, including a free publication created by London’s Daily Telegraph, called Juice. The magazine-style Juice relies on content from the Telegraph, but it’s presented with the younger reader in mind.
Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and retired chairman of the Gannett newspaper group, is skeptical that targeting 18- to 24-year-olds will succeed in creating paying newspaper readers. "That’s far too late, because they’re already hooked on TV and the Internet," he said. "We can’t get them back."
The Associated Press’ plan to send its subscribers packages of stories written for 9- to 11-year-olds is closer to the mark, Neuharth said, but he would recommend taking aim at 3- to 9-year-olds.
"We have to study what hooks them, and then see if we can put that on printed pages," he said.
