The summaries from the first business session focused on "Total Youth Think" strategies, which aim to introduce younger thinking into the newspaper without alienating older readers.

Don’t Think - Know

Before you launch any project to attract young readers, start with a study of their habits, says Ms Jacobsen.

Too many newspapers make assumptions about young people, and such studies can provide surprises.

“You must asked in-depth questions about there relationships with the newspaper,” says Ms Jacobsen, who has launched such a study, which the company intends to continue for 10 to 15 years.

She found, for example, that 91 percent of teen-agers who still live with their parents read the print newspaper, but only 17 percent read the on-line version. “This was a wake up call to our editors,” she says. “We thought young people were online, but that was not the case.”

She also found that young adults who had used newspapers in the classroom were more likely to subscribe to the paper than those who did not, and that young readers were not interested in the content of “youth sections”. These findings had an obvious impact on strategy.

For example, to encourage teachers to use the newspaper in classrooms, the group’s local newspapers created weekly school tools with ideas and directions for using the newspaper. The tools are published in the newspapers, so that students who see them can bring them to class and encourage their teachers to use them.

Linking Generations Through the Newspaper

Putting young readers in a “ghetto” of special youth sections doesn’t work anymore. But how to integrate the subjects that interest young people in a newspaper without alienating older readers?

At Gazeta Wyborcza, the solution is to find common ground.

“You have to look for ideas that link generations,” says Mr Piechota. “People want to be linked, and the newspaper can help them do it.”

Mr Piechota provided examples of ideas that appeal to everyone: serious causes to engage the public; encouraging young people to submit interviews and photos of their grandparents as eyewitnesses to history; organising walking tours led by the newspaper’s journalists; and many others.

Interaction with readers is the key. “Tell them you expect their involvement, and ask them to contribute,” says Mr Piechota.

But it is important to give them tools to do so. “Readers who send us photos don’t do it by e-mail,” he says. “They go to our website and upload photos, it’s very easy for them to interact with the newspaper.”

And, since the paper encourages contributions - it receives 250,000 photos from 30,000 contributors a year (most from people 25 years old or younger) - it created a photography school to improve their skills.

From Print to All Platforms

When the print edition of 24sata was launched in 2005, its associated website was nothing more than a ‘teaser’ to build print circulation, says Mr Trupcevic.

But now that the print edition is the market leader in Croatia, it was time to relaunch the website and add all other channels - mobile, web tv, Facebook, Twitter -- for a true multimedia strategy.

24sata calls itself “the newspaper for a new generation” and its penetration among you people is the envy of newspapers everywhere. The new platforms are designed to enhance that approach. “Our philosophy is, ‘faster, shorter, clearer,’” says Mr Trupcevic.

Here are some of the innovations that Mr Trupcevic covered in his presentation:

 Unique among newspaper websites, 24sata.com doesn’t scroll - the site automatically adjusts to the screen resolution. Any story can have text, video and photo galleries appear instantaneously in one screen, without jumping from one media format to another. Any story can be viewed as article only, video only or text only.

The challenge to meet was to build a website that won’t be more of the same in the already competitive environment in the news portals market, “ says Mr Trupcevic. “It has be different, intuitive, simple and multimedial.”

 Likewise, mobile24sata.hr fits the size of mobile displays. It provides full screen images and video clips. It’s a paid-for service with 2,000 subscribers, who pay 1 Euro a week - mobile web browsing is in its infancy in Croatia.

 The newly launched 24sata News TV is television built for viewing on the internet, with short news items in a modern TV format for the computer screen.

The summaries from the second business session provides lessons from the winners of the World Young Reader Awards.

Pay Attention to Youthful Enthusiasm

When the Express & Echo launched a campaign last year to reduce the number of plastic bags used by supermarkets, it noticed that young people were deeply involved in the effort.

“We had had such a positive response from our young readers that we were keen to harness that enthusiasm to develop a city-wide school project,” says Mr Astley.

That’s how the “Green Team” campaign was born. The objective of the campaign is to devise green initiatives to improve the local environment. Progress is charted on a weekly page, which the youngsters write themselves, and in a quarterly supplement.

“There has been a tremendous response to the campaign and we have 12 schools committed to doing their bit for the environment,” says Mr Astley. “Much of the success is, we believe, due to the fact that we asked the youngsters to help shape the project. Long before the campaign was launched, we organised several meetings with young children to seek their advice and gather ideas.”

The other key factor was partnership, says Mr Astley. Financial and administrative support is supplied by the Exeter City Council, while sponsors fund parts of the project to free up more money for the environmental projects themselves.

Turn NIE into NSIE (Newspaper Sponsorships for Education)

Hamburg’s children are poor readers, ranked second from last in a nationwide study of reading skills.

When the director of the nationwide study said, “reading a newspaper every day will advance the reading capability of pupils significantly, “ the Hamburger Abendblatt decided that all high schools in Hamburg (from grade 5 through 12) should receive the Hamburger Abendblatt daily and free of charge.

But that’s an expensive proposition, so the newspapers took it one step further - it launched a marketing campaign to find sponsors for the subscriptions, arguing that the programme was good for the community. “We asked readers to support schools by becoming a sponsor of a Hamburger Abendblatt subscription,” says XXX.

The response was overwhelming; the mayor of Hamburg became a sponsor. So did personalities from sports, politics and the arts. Large companies and banks signed up. foundations, parents, grandparents, day to day readers, all became sponsors.

Most sponsored one to three subscriptions, but some companies sponsored up to 100 subscriptions, all at the full price of 249 Euros per year - no discounted subscriptions (sponsors, from individuals to companies, were featured in the newspaper, and were invited to visit the schools).

In just one month, all 240 high schools in Hamburg were fully sponsored.

“Free My Daddy”

The Journal Des Enfants, a weekly newspaper for 8- to 14-year olds, tackled a difficult subject in an unusual way, and raised awareness of an important issue as well as awareness of the newspaper itself.

The “Free My Daddy” project focused on press freedom and the jailing of journalists from the view of children whose parents were arrested and jailed. “We decided to conceive a project where children can identify themselves,” says Mr Grüdler. “We wanted to show that journalists who are jailed for doing their jobs also have families. And we wanted the children to identify with them. ‘What if my dad was a journalist who was jailed, what would happen to me?’”

The stories included interviews with children of jailed journalists in Burma, China, Cuba, Algeria and Tunisia, and an interview with a journalist forced to leave Rwanda without her family.

In addition to raising awareness of the issue, the newspaper also wanted to raise its own profile. It partnered with Reporters Without Borders, and with 20 regional newspapers, who bought the content and published it in their own titles. The Journal Des Enfants has a normal circulation of 45,000; with the partnerships the circulation for “Free My Daddy” rose to 1.6 million.

Almost all the journalists featured in the articles were released after the articles appeared - China and Cuba were the exceptions. “We like to think that we contributed to allowing these journalists to be free,” says Mr Grüdler.

There were other benefits as well: circulation increased and the newspaper has a higher profile with journalists, teachers and parents.