The 17th World Editors Forum will take place this year in Hamburg, Germany from 6-8 October, focusing on mobile news distribution and new content platforms, content monetization, multimedia newsrooms and new media training, social networks and how to work with Google News.

Highlights include:

Paul Steiger, editor of ProPublica, will give a keynote speech on new ways to finance quality journalism. ProPublica, founded in 2007 with a large donation from the Sandler Foundation, is the largest investigative journalism outlet in the US and has been an inspiration to many others. Focusing on high quality journalism, stories which "shine a spotlight on abuse or power of failure to uphold the public interest," ProPublica offers its stories at no cost to news organisations, including the chance to cooperate in the later stages of reporting. A collaboration with the New York Times on hospitals in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina led to a Pulitzer Prize for ProPublica journalist Sheri Fink in April of this year.

ProPublica received a $1.01 million grant from the Knight Foundation in mid-2009 to help with its mission to create a sustainable business model. Going nonprofit is clearly not an option for all news outlets, but much debate has focused on whether donations and foundations could fund more public interest journalism than they currently do.

Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times Company, will also give a keynote speech where she will share details about the paper's upcoming paywall. In January 2010, The New York Times announced that it was to implement a metered payment model on its website in January 2011. Arguably a highly significant step for the news industry, given the paper's standing and its huge number of unique visitors to its impressive multimedia-filled website, it may well become a model for other papers if it is deemed successful.

The New York Times' proposed payment system - a set number of free articles per month for each reader before being asked to pay, is a less extreme paywall compared to the Times of London, for example, which will not let anybody past its home page without a subscription. Which model will prove effective in terms of promoting reader loyalty and boosting revenue?

At a time when the fragility of the print medium has been debated at length, Editor of Die Zeit, Giovanni di Lorenzo, will speak about "Why I believe in print." It would seem he has good reason to believe in the medium, as the German weekly has seen substantial subscriber growth over the last seven years.

Described by top newspaper designer Mario Garcia (who oversaw the paper's redesign) as possibly "the best existing example of the printed newspaper of the future," Die Zeit has won several prestigious awards from the Society of News Design. Its analysis and in-depth pieces, largely focused on politics and public affairs have given it a reputation for quality and seriousness. What can editors of daily papers learn from the experience of a weekly? In this age of immediacy of news, does a weekly review-style publication make sense?

If anyone wants a break from talking about the newspaper industry, the World Editors Forum offers participants the chance to attend a session with Nobel Prize winning author and playwright Günter Grass. Born to Polish-German parents in Danzig-Langfuhr in 1927, Grass fought in and was captured during the Second World War, eventually settling in Berlin as an artist and writer.

His best-known novel, The Tin Drum, was published in 1959. He has won many awards for his fiction, which is always imbued with social and political commentary, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, shortly after the publication of My Century (Mein Jahrhundert.) It is this work, an account of the 20th century told through personal experiences of many different characters, which he will speak about at the Forum.