Nobody can accuse Wikileaks of being afraid of the spotlight. The whistleblower organization hit the headlines again this month as the un-redacted US Embassy cables became available online, and old arguments about its status as an institution resurfaced. Many have scrambled to have their say, but few have given the matter as much thought as Charlie Beckett.

Beckett is founding director of POLIS, the journalism think-tank in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. An award-winning journalist, he is currently writing a book about Wikileaks to be published by Polity in the autumn. He talks here about how we shouldn't see WikiLeaks as an 'aberration' but as part of the changing landscape of modern journalism.

Beckett will be chairing a panel at the 18th World Editors Forum in Vienna this October about journalism "after WikiLeaks" and how newspapers should respond. 

BECKETT: In the past journalism was done by journalists who worked for institutions like newspapers. But increasingly everyone is doing journalism. We saw that in Tunisia and Egypt, but we also see it every day with people writing stuff on social media. And WikiLeaks, in a sense, is just another example of this. My point is that we shouldn't see WikiLeaks as an aberration. It's quite an extreme example of non-traditional journalism but in many ways I think it's symptomatic of a trend that is going to accelerate. I think we're going to see more of these irregular journalistic producers.

BECKETT: In a sense, the history of WikiLeaks is the history of Julian Assange. It started off in Australia as a computer-hacking, politically active platform for whistleblowers. The idea was people would upload their leaks and Wikileaks wouldn't even choose the leaks: if you sent it something, it would put it up. And that evolved when they started to choose what they would leak and they started to work with mainstream newspapers like Der Spiegel, The Guardian... They did that because they wanted access to those audiences but it meant that their journalism changed. It meant that they had to edit what they were doing, share information. And so in a sense they became more like a traditional investigative journalism outfit. Of course that's all been brought into question because WikiLeaks has, generally speaking, fallen out with a lot of the people that it worked with. With the latest unrestricted release of the information about the Embassy Cables in a sense they've gone back to their founding principles of just releasing information regardless of the consequences.

BECKETT: No, I don't think it has. There is a fundamental change, which is that in the past journalists were, generally speaking, the only way that you could get your information out of the public. The internet has changed all that and it means that whistleblowers can do it themselves if they want. What has changed has not been the journalists so much as what's happening around them.

What's interesting about WikiLeaks is that people went to WikiLeaks because they weren't journalists. Traditional journalists have to observe the law of the land, they have libel problems, they have codes of ethics, etc. and so they had to be more careful. And WikiLeaks was seen as a place which was, in a sense, braver or, some would say, foolhardy. Journalists, in a way, can't compete with that.

BECKETT: If you feel that you're in an authoritarian situation, you want to go to somebody who is anti-establishment. WikiLeaks plays exactly that role.

The big question that WikiLeaks poses for traditional journalism is: have you done your job properly? Have you been tough enough on authority? WikiLeaks is a challenge to say; is your journalism really holding power to account? Regardless of whether you think WikiLeaks has done this rightly or wrongly, that's what they've done.

BECKETT: Yes, definitely. I've spoken to diplomats in the State Department and what they will say off the record is that this was a huge screw up. The specific leak that led to the most famous WikiLeaks publications was all from one particular incident. They screwed up.

Officials say, yes of course we're going to change out security processes to make sure this doesn't happen again, but the American system can't operate without the flow of information so there is always going to be the risk that material is leaked. So yes, they're going to try to patrol information, but they realize that, in a world where there is so much data that is necessary for something like diplomacy or a military operation, it's very difficult to restrict that information.

I don't think you can say that WikiLeaks is going to bring upon us some sort of clampdown. Whenever journalists leak documents governments always say, oh this is terrible, we're never going to work again. But of course they always do.

BECKETT: I don't think it's entirely in conflict with traditional journalism. It does a lot of the things that journalists like to do. It reveals information that's important to know. At times it's even done things like edit films and so on. But generally I think it's best to see it as part of journalism and part of this new networked-in environment where if you're a so-called traditional journalist on Sky News or for The Times, you're quite likely to get your information now from Facebook or Twitter. It's now part of a new ecology and I think it's a pointless discussion whether WikiLeaks is journalism or not. It's part of journalism.

BECKETT: Well I think it's going to make it much harder. Some people are going to feel uncomfortable about releasing information to Wikileaks because their systems aren't perfect and they're seen to behave erratically at times. I think that if you're a traditional mainstream news organization you'll be much more wary about dealing with Wikileaks because they're unpredictable.

BECKETT: No effect at all. It's entirely normal. 99% of leaks in politics are about people trying to get their agenda forwarded: you leak a document to try and attack the Labour Party or you leak a document to try and embarrass the Conservative government. It doesn't mean that it's not an important leak. The same thing applies to news organisations. Look at Rupert Mudoch, look at the Guardian: they all have political agendas. WikiLeaks has been very, very clear that they are what they call a justice orgainisation, and they're against the abuse of power and they want to expose wrong-doing by governments and so on. They've not been dishonest, they've been very clear that that what they're trying to do.

BECKETT: I think that's what they should do anyway. News organisations should be places that people can come to because they want to reveal things. This is as old as journalism itself. People come up to you and say, "don't use my name, but..."

I think the trouble has been that with a lot of journalism the public doesn't see the journalists as on their side. Take the phone hacking scandal. The phone hacking was illegal in the same way that WikiLeaks was illegal. But that wasn't done for any public interest, it was purely to embarrass people and to create sensationalist stories. So I don't think it's that traditional journalism has to invent a new model for itself, it just has to do what it's supposed to do properly.

BECKETT: Yes, I do actually! I'm afraid it's not a simple answer. We're moving into a phase where journalism is much more complicated. It used to be nice and simple: there were newspapers and radio programs and TV programs and they were run by people called journalists, who were subject to a very narrow set of rules. Now people like WikiLeaks are creating much greater diversity in journalism, some of which is dangerous, some of which is incompetent, but lots of which is incredibly informative and, this is an important point, it's incredibly popular. This is a period of transition and anybody that tells you they know where we're going to end up is lying.

The company unites digital technology with a very focused local approach. One of the JRC's initiatives has been the Register Citizen Newsroom Café in Torrington, Connecticut, a project that invites members of the public into the newsroom and encourages them to contribute to the news. 

Brady, formerly of The Washington Post and TBD, joined the JRC in March 2011 to lead 'Project Thunderdome', a plan to centralize national content and hence give local reporters more time to stick to local stories.

Brady will be speaking at the 18th World Editors Forum in Vienna about how to build a community around your publication.

If you're going to be 'digital first' you have to live up to that; news has to go out when it breaks, you can't hold things for the paper. It's embracing local and realizing now that you can reach people 24/7 on a device that's usually attached to their pocket. 'Digital first' is just throwing off the chains of a very rigid print schedules; there's no logic of why we print the paper at the time we do other than we want to get it to you when you wake up in the morning. There's a lot of other time in the day to get news to people and we can't build our entire ecosystem around getting the paper out or else we'll leave about 18 hours of the day on the floor.

Thunderdome is a project to help centralize resources to produce non-local content for all of the JRC's properties. Every local paper in the chain has national content in it but it's not their area of expertise. We want local papers to focus on covering their local communities and not on covering Wall Street or the war in Afghanistan. So we're creating a centralized team to produce that content for all of the local papers and their websites; that will free up a lot of the resources in the building to go back out on the streets and report, as opposed to doing production work.

The first tip would be one that's a little offbeat, I guess, for digital, which is don't forget about the need for face-to-face contact. I think we found, certainly at TBD [Brady's previous project] that actually going out and meeting the people that you're meant to be working with was really important. You've got to meet the community or else you're not really going to be able to cover it that well.

Secondly I think transparency with the community's important. If you miss a story, or you get something wrong in a story, I think openness really goes a long way.

The third one is understand what they want too. At TBD we built a network of 250 blogs and we just pointed to them. A lot of people said: 'why don't you take their blogs and put them on your site?' Because they would not have been as happy partners if we had done that, because they're trying to build their own businesses with their own reputations. You've got to help them do that. Work with them on their terms.

It's been very positive. The openness of that newsroom led to the governor of Connecticut coming in and unveiling his budget there. It got a lot of good buzz and I think that this kind of openness is too rare in newsrooms. The fact that a reader who doesn't like what the paper has written can essentially walk right up to the editor or the reporter and tell him that he thought the story wasn't right - in some cases I think it's a positive thing. I'm not sure that every reporter in the world would agree with that!

But in the end we have to be accountable for what we write. This works both ways, you know - if the reader is off base then the reporter is perfectly able to get into a discussion with that reader. It can be the opportunity for a good discussion that could lead to a better relationship with people in the community. So I think it's been a huge hit and we definitely want to expand it beyond Torrington. 

First of all, the Times is in its own category so if the paywall works for them that doesn't mean its going to work for anybody else. Generally, I'm not in favor of paywalls because I think they work against the whole orientation of the web. A lot of the web is about discovery; you find a site you didn't know about before because somebody linked to it. If you put it behind a big paywall - not The New York Times' version which is a metered thing - but if you're talking about just a pure paywall, Google doesn't index you, blogs don't link to you. You really lock yourself off from the rest of the internet.

A lot of the time that paywall only exists to preserve print readers, and the truth is the print readers are not going to be around forever, so what are you going to do when they're not around any more to buy the paper or pay for the website? You're going to have a whole generation of readers who are not used to paying for content who are not going to come to your site. And you're not going to be able to grow any new audience because you're totally blocked off from the rest of the internet. So I think the pure paywall is a huge mistake.

I don't think that money's going to be here this year or maybe even next, but I think location-based stuff is going to be huge, especially in small communities. Every local advertiser wants, for the most part, people in their store. So I want more people to look at the location-based stuff and say 'we will only deliver this ad to readers that we know are within a mile of your pizza place'. And that's a pretty good sell point for a pizza place that's not going to spend a lot of money on buying a region-wide ad.

Events is one [model] that people are starting to experiment with that I think is a good one. There's certainly no reason you can't charge for events around public debates.

I've always liked the services model. I know it's gone through its ups and downs but the idea of helping small advertisers with their social media strategy or with creation of advertising - I think small papers should be doing that.

The line I've used a bunch of times in the past has been "there's no silver bullet". It's little chunks of a bullet and that are going to come from different revenue streams.

It's giving people time to do their reporting and time to do the research they need to. It's not easy, there's no doubt about that, in this world where the web rewards you producing a lot of content but you don't always have a lot of people.

So I actually think the way to preserve editorial quality is by trusting other bloggers and other sites in the community to help you produce it. I think that's been a bit of a mental block for a lot of papers that say, "that person's not on staff, they're not a professional journalist". And at TBD our attitude was, if we've gone back and read the last two or three months worth of this blogger's work, at some point you just have to decide this person's credible: they've built an audience, they've been accurate, they've been impactful. And if they can fit in all those criteria I don't really care if they came out of school with a BA in journalism or not.

The answer is not to try to tell a newsroom to produce twice as much content with the same number of people because there's no way that you can avoid quality degrading a little bit if you do that.

I think it's to go where the readers are. A line that somebody used, I can't remember who it was: "We have to stop trying to get people to our homepage and we have to start getting our homepage to the people" And I think the concept there is that you know people are spending a ton of time on Google and on Twitter and on Facebook and you've just got to be there.

It's to get Thunderdome launched. It's to get out to all the newsrooms as quickly as possible and talk about where we're headed and just let them know where we want to

take the company journalistically. It's to raise to overall quality of the journalism at JRC. Not to say it's bad not - it's not. But there's a lot we can do via partnerships, via expanding the local reporting.

And I think we need to improve the look and feel of our websites. I think the websites are fine, but we're not doing as good a job as we could of making it clear to the reader what we think the biggest stories of the day are and we're not doing a good enough job of engaging the audience in aggressive and high-profile ways. So we're working on that as well.

Klein heads a team of programmers and journalists who create new software that allows users not just to read stories, but to interact with them and find out how national trends are relevant to their daily lives. Projects range from The Opportunity Gap, a database where users can compare how well states provide richer and poorer schools with the same access to advanced classes, to Dollars for Docs, a programme that readers can use to find whether their own doctor has been paid money by drug companies. 

Klein will be speaking at the 18th World Editors Forum, from 12th - 15th October in Vienna, about how news organizations can look beyond traditional forms to create more interactive methods of story-telling.

Designing a news application is like editing any news story. You need to know what your story is, you need to know what your nut is, what point you're trying to make. So the most important thing is, it's still journalism.

"Journalism is about helping people figure out how to live their lives" (not my quote, I don't remember who said it first!) News applications help people see what's relevant to them in a large, complex world. For The Opportunity Gap, what we really focused on was giving people the ability to find their own school, which is a very small part of the process, but it anchored the story into their life for them. They were able to pivot from their school to schools near them, and then also to rich and poor schools, the extremes in their state or in their district. So they were able to tell the story themselves using their own experience and their own situations.

Absolutely. That is absolutely core to the news app. Amanda Cox, a designer at The New York Times, and an absolutely marvelous statistician and news graphics designer, says that graphics should tell a story. And I like to say that the news graphics tell a story, the news apps tell your story. You'll be able to come to a new understanding not just of a national trend, but of exactly how it relates to you.

We don't see what we present as really raw: everything that's in one of the news applications that we create has been analyzed and cleaned. The real question is that how do we make it so that you're not overwhelmed with the volume of data that's available? This can be a struggle. Sometimes we're really good at it and sometimes we're not as good... It's about focus, and it's about traditional editing; "hey this whole column of numbers is not germane to what we're trying to tell, it will just confuse people, let's cut that whole thing out."

Well obviously the first thing is the availability of a large data set. And also a story where there is both a big national trend but that is made up of a lot of little local stories. We have had a tremendous amount of success doing things like that. One of the things we've found that's been fascinating and really gratifying is that when we do a big national story local news organizations will actually pick up their locality. For The Opportunity Gap, we had lots of local news outlets doing stories about access to education in their area.

The New York Times is always a huge leader in this. But there've been lots and lots. One of the very finest pieces of 'news-appery' was the LA Times's 'mapping LA' project. They realized that there is no canonical neighborhood map in LA that everybody agreed on and it ultimately made it very difficult for them to do neighborhood stories: which neighborhood has the best schools, which neighborhood has the worst crime, because nobody really agreed on where x neighborhood ended. So they crowd-sourced a map of LA and invited people to draw the boundaries of the various neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The project ran for quite a while, and eventually a consensus was reached. Then the LA Times had in its possession a canonical map of the neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and this generated stories. Now the LA Times can offer crime statistics for Los Angeles with angles like 'what's your neighbourhood like?' 

They're absolutely crucial. Appearance is one thing but with each news application we think deeply about user behavior that we expect; in other words, what information might they want from this, and how can we pave those paths really cleanly so that they can get to it first.

But also, what behavior do we want? Do we want them to take this information and share it on Facebook? Do we want them to take some sort of action? We might really want them to go and look at a ranking of states. Or do we want them to look up their particular doctor, for Dollars For Docs? If so lets make the 'search your doctor' the biggest, brightest thing on the page. 

It is. I think that we took some of our cues from the New York Times's Oscars app. For a week or two before the Oscars you could make your own ballot, pick the things you think are going to win, then share it with your friends and start competitions with your friends on Facebook.

So we took that as our inspiration. We said, well, how can we apply that to a big national education story? So we let people find their school, find the schools in their state that are outliers or find schools in their state that are interesting to them. It's easy for them to collect them all into one page and just share that page on Facebook.

We didn't really have any number expectations and so I can't really quote you numbers. It was much more an experiment to see how we could do this both for this app and going forward.

Absolutely. There's no doubt, we are in the infancy of news apps. We're kind of learning as we go, and consequently there's sort of a culture of sharing a bit with news apps. There are few enough of us that we all know each other, we're all kind of on the same mail lists, we see each other at the same conferences, we're all on Skype with each other!

Fewer than 50 people. We're very much at the beginning: I can see that probably doubling in the next year. I hope newsrooms everywhere start taking this up.

Oh, they're huge. They are the most popular things on the ProPublica website. The search your doctor feature on Dollars For Doc is the single most popular feature on Propublica ever: bigger than any story, bigger than any other news app.

Oh absolutely. I think that news applications are very much an answer to that question, right? Everything we do in my department here at ProPublica is investigative and accountability-focused just as much as the long-form stories. Everything that we do is mission-focused. But it exploits technology that five years ago didn't exist. A whole new ocean of investigation has become possible because the tools you can use to scrutinize big powerful systems are becoming more and more sophisticated and at the same time cheaper and cheaper.

Something that we have not yet started thinking about is the story form itself. We still write stories and produce stories and the technology still understands stories in the same way that it did fifty years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago. And the story is kind of a monolithic element. But to some extent the story needs to be broken up a bit more and treated both as a story in the traditional narrative sense but also as a collection of pieces of data.

For instance Politifact. They have a system where it's not just a big long news story, but they break it up. Who are we talking about? What are the comments they made that we're assessing? Were they true, were they not? What state is this associated with? And then they can do deep introspection into this. They can say, let me just see what are the facts in Florida. Let me see just the facts or non-facts said by President Obama. And there's an incredible amount of interesting stuff that can be unlocked if you start treating stories both as stories, because no one wants them to go away, but also as complex collections of data.

In 2003 he oversaw the redesign of the paper in compact form, an innovation so successful that other major British dailies followed suit. And last year he presided over the launch of i, a lower-priced digest of stories from The Independent targeted at on-the-go readers.

Kelner is due to speak at the World Editors Forum in Vienna (12-15 October) about i and its success so far.

KELNER: It's been a tremendous success. The circulation sales followed the normal trajectory of a launch - very high at the start and then slowly came down to a very healthy level. But then we came back at the start of this year with a big advertising campaign and sales have continued to grow ever since then. Now we're selling around about 180,000 a day.

KELNER: I think it has given a lot of newspaper organisations pause for thought, the idea that you could launch a new printed product that gave people what they wanted at an affordable price, as you say synthesizing the material that you already produce. And it's successful.

KELNER: i has a younger more metropolitan readership. It's a newspaper that was targeted at a young, mobile commuter-focused audience.

KELNER: It's much more up-market than The Metro. And obviously The Metro's free and i has a cover price. But it's targeted at people who are on the move, who have busy lifestyles and i fits into their profile.

KELNER: No. One of the very encouraging things ever since i has launched is that it hasn't cannibalised the sales of The Independent too much. And the same is true of other quality papers as well. It's definitely grown the market in terms of quality readership.

KELNER: We only launched the Saturday edition in response to reader demand. It [i] was launched originally as a Monday-to-Friday product. We've responded to the needs of our readers all the way along, in small ways and in quite large ways. And obviously launching the Saturday was quite a major thing for us, but it was very much in response to what readers wanted. And they've supported it and we're very, very pleased with the level of sales on the Saturday.

KELNER: I think what i proved is that if you have a product that meets a need in the market and you have marketing that communicates what is the proposition of the product then it's the formula for a success.

KELNER: You can have the best marketing in the world and if the product doesn't meet the needs of the audience you're not going to do very well. What we started off with was assessing what the needs of the audience were and then directing a product very much at those needs.

KELNER: Well the front page is your shop window really and it's the best bit of marketing communication that you can put before the public. So if you're editing a paper everything's important, the comment pages, the sports pages, but the front page is the most important of all because a lot of our sale comes from casual purchase and if you can arrest people's attention at the newsagents where there's all those other products then you're halfway there.

KELNER: I think we've seen that, since the News of the World has gone, a lot of sales have gone to their direct competitors like the Sunday Mirror and the People and The Star. I think a lot of quality newspaper readers bought the News of the World but they bought it in addition to a quality paper so I'm not sure that there's much for us to gain by the demise of the News of the World.

Politifact is best known for its 'truth-o-meter', a scale that rates the accuracy of statements made by politicians and lobbyists. At the top end, accurate assertions are labeled 'true' while at the bottom people who tell barefaced lies are named and shamed: 'pants on fire'.

Politifact was launched in 2007 as part of the St Petersburg Times. It proved so popular that it now has several subsidiary state websites and is affiliated with nine other papers around the US. In the wake of its success a number of other US publications, including The Washington Post, have started fact-checking services. Politifact was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Bill Adair will be speaking at the World Editors Forum, which will be held in Vienna from 12 - 15 October, in a session on 'Looking beyond the article,' exploring new ways to tell news stories.

WAN-IFRA: Politifact focuses on fact-checking statements made by key players in American politics. What do you think the most important shortcomings are in the way news stories are reported in the mainstream media - is it just lack of accuracy?

ADAIR: I would say two things. Firstly, I would say there is not enough accountability journalism, which is what Politifact tries to do. I think in the past we've let politicians get away with exaggerations and falsehoods because we assumed that our readers would do their own fact-checking. I think that's a flaw in journalistic thinking: I think it's important for us to give people the tools they need to make sense of their government and the political debate and so I think increasingly that means we have to tell them what's true and what's not.

I would say one other flaw is that there's too much emphasis on the politics, on who's up and who's down, who's winning and who's losing and not enough on the substance of what the things would really mean for voters. Politifact is really a creative way of covering issues and public policy. I think of it like getting people to eat their vegetables. They don't want to eat their vegetables but if you can make the vegetables tasty they will eat them.

I think you have to use Twitter and Facebook properly. Obviously, as we've seen most recently with some of the reaction in the United States to the killings in Norway, people will jump to conclusions quickly and use whatever media they can and get things out there that may not be accurate. So I think we have to be wise about how we use these. But in a way, Twitter is no different than a breaking news report in radio or television. You have a limited amount of space or time and it's tempting to put things out there that aren't thoroughly reported.

We get lots and lots of reader feedback. The biggest one lately has been readers overwhelmingly telling us they want us to change the truth-o-meter. The truth-o-meter has had, since we started, six levels and the level between half-true and false has been called barely true. And we have received thousands of emails from readers who support the idea that we floated that we should change it; instead of calling it 'barely true' we're going to call it 'mostly false'.

The problem with 'barely true' is that the statement is mostly not true but by putting the word 'true' in it, many people felt it was misleading. And so we had many instances over the years, most recently one where one of our state Politifact sites ruled a statement 'barely true' from the National Republican Congressional Committee and they issued a press release, the Republicans did, that says "Politifact finds the statement 'true'". That wasn't what we found, we had said it was 'barely true'. So we turned around and we rated the new statement 'pants on fire' and said 'that's ridiculous'.

Our readers are very smart and thoughtful and funny and we get a lot of great ideas from them. I would say that probably one fourth to one third of the facts that we check are suggestions from our readers.

ADAIR: You have to figure out what messages are really getting widespread distribution. If somebody makes a claim in one blog and it ends there that's not the kind of thing we would fact-check. But if that blog post is tweeted repeatedly or posted on Facebook many times or used in emails that are copied and forwarded then we're more likely to fact check it.

Let me step back for a second and say I think the whole concept of media has changed dramatically. In the 1960s in any country there were a few television networks and probably some large newspapers and they were the filters that decided what information people needed to read or to hear. What's happened in the internet age is that those filters, the legacy media, are not as important any more because you may get information from your newspaper or your television network still, but you probably also get information from blogs and internet news sources and even emails that are forwarded to you by your crazy uncle who has various conspiracy theories. And so it's important for us as journalists, particularly as fact checkers, to realize the filter is gone.

ADAIR: Probably the biggest one is to look to original sources. One of the things that we require at Politifact is that when our reporters are researching an article, they will find the original voting record, will find the original speech that someone gave in congress, and the original report, rather than relying on news accounts of those things. And I think what I have seen in looking at a lot of journalism is that journalists have gotten accustomed to doing their work quickly and not digging as deeply as they should.

ADAIR: It depends on the will of the news organization. I work with some newspapers in the United States that really impress me with their commitment to not just Politifact but to great journalism. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is one paper that really puts an emphasis on great journalism. But there are other newspapers in the United States that are not willing to make that commitment and that's sad because I think what we have shown with Politifact is that readers love the truth-o-meter. Readers love this kind of accountability journalism.

ADAIR: Generally they really like it. When we started we wanted to have a website that was not too serious and that people would get a chuckle out of every now and then. Obviously we take the journalism seriously but we try to mix it up and present it in such a way that its fun and accessible and I think that's really important. Too much political coverage is too dry and boring and its why a lot of people would rather watch TMZ and get the latest Hollywood news. I think we have found the right balance with Politifact that is both substantive but also a little cheeky.

Novak is scheduled to speak at the 18th World Editors Forum in Vienna (12-15 October) about how to build a community around your newspaper.

NOVAK: I personally believe that we will not be able to completely defend our position as information channels in the long run, knowing how much information giants like Google and Facebook have already collected from our readership. We must start building another type of relationship with our community and we have decided that if there's one position that none of the giants will ever take it's the 'girl-next-door', the friendship, the nice neighbour. We changed our vision in 2009; the old one was that we should always be first with the latest news from the local scene. Now it says that Norran connects people and ideas and together we strengthen the region.

Alexandra Föderl-Schmid is Editor-in-Chief of Der Standard, and under her direction the paper has continued to do well despite the global downturn in print sales. She started freelancing for the paper in 1990 and held many posts there including Germany correspondent, EU correspondent and chief business editor before being appointed to the top job in 2007.

Föderl-Schmid is due to speak at the World Editors Forum in Vienna (12-15 October) about what content print newspapers should focus on to not just survive but also thrive.

Garcia has earned his reputation as one of the leading newspaper designers in the world with numerous prestigious redesign projects, including The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Die Zeit. Naturally, his philosophy that the audience comes first has left its imprint on all the digital projects he's taken up.

Garcia will speak at the 18th World Editors Forum in Vienna (12-15 October) at a session dedicated to successful tablet applications. In this e-mail interview he shares his thoughts on the latest developments in tablet publishing.

WAN-IFRA: You have written a lot about the unique experience that must be found on tablets... How do you feel newspapers' efforts stack up thus far?

GARCIA: We are making progress, but it is slow progress; first, many newspaper publishers and editors do not see the tablet making money for them quickly, and that is a drawback, because in the case of the tablet one must be patient. There is no question in my mind that the tablets are, indeed, game changers for the industry. But the payoff is not going to come in a moment - more like three to five years. However, the tablet as a platform must be introduced as soon as possible by all titles.

In terms of the news apps that we see, many are beginning to get away from the "let's copy the printed newspaper" model and creating real news apps with personality and where the platform is utilized to its potential. It will take time.

GARCIA: I like what Tages Anzeiger of Switzerland has just done with its new tablet edition. I like what many Scandinavian dailies are beginning to do, Dagens Nyheter of Sweden, for example. I read El País and The New York Times on the tablet all the time for their superb content, but they are NOT there yet in breaking away from the newspaper look and feel and offering more videos and pop-up moments. And, of course, Germany's Bild, that popular mass market daily, has some of the best pop-up moments of any newspaper in the tablet.

GARCIA: You must create a unique, curated tablet edition; appoint a tablet editor; appoint a photo/video editor; and design not just for the brain and the eye, but also for the finger, which becomes a protagonist on this platform. Readers want things to happen in a non-linear format. They don't want to flip pages on the tablet - not all the time, anyway. The tablet must make the finger happy.

GARCIA: Transferring is the big mistake. Forget transferring! Pretend there is no printed product and that you are here to create a tablet-only newspaper. Then abandon the legacy syndrome that suffocates, and move on to create tablet experiences. Do not think that the tablet edition is an online edition either. The tablet is its own platform, able to give stories "longer legs."

GARCIA: The tablet is a lean-back platform. Readers want to sort of disconnect (while connected) with the tablet. Give me the experience of the movies, a little TV, some radio, some newsweekly magazine reading experience à la Life of the '60s. Relax with the tablet.

GARCIA: See if you can customize content (which Tages Anzeiger does nicely now). Create a tablet edition that talks to the reader, from one person to another. Create these "content suites" that are so personal that you wish to come there daily, at that time of the day when you take off your shoes and lie on the couch.

GARCIA: They are going to be the platform of choice for obtaining information, no question. In that sense (see answer to first question), it is not a matter of IF a newspaper goes tablet, but WHEN and HOW. Every newspaper should have at least a 1.0 edition of the tablet as soon as possible.