Señor has many pieces of advice for editors, including:

• In the digital age, you have to integrate software with hardware
• We cannot pretend to be enslaved still by the demands of one process, printing a newspaper
• Paper vs online is a false dichotomy that has to end
• Newsrooms are in a permanent state of beta
• We need many, many developers, both in house and outsourced. If we don’t have developers in there, it’s very difficult to make things different
• The newsroom should be one digital kitchen, which means author once, publish everywhere: stories should not just be produced for one platform
• Journalist + designer + developer = new holy trinity

Moving on to social media:

• Journalists should spend 10% of their time on social media – it’s not an extraordinary amount of time, but all good media is by definition social
• Remember that social media is not a medium but a platform
• News organisations should not be just retweeting but beginning, advancing and ending the conversations.

Señor highlighted some of the most unusual newsrooms from around the world, starting with Jawa Pos. The Indonesian newspaper has a young, fun newsroom, with a gym, a ping pong table, a music studio and more on site. The concept is similar to Google’s strategy: if staff area happy and having fun, they will come up with good ideas. Members of the public can come also into the newsroom. It is not closed off from the rest of the world.

To do that, it has made many changes during the past several years and has been investing in new-media and related areas, such as creating video teams and interactive teams, increasing production skills, and starting a live news desk.

When we recruit these days, Ms MacLeod says, we are looking for a new kind of journalist with new skills rather than only the traditional ones of good reporting and writing.

She says these new skills include:

• Data skills and the ability to mine and interpret data
• Interactive graphic skills and the ability to work in Flash or HTML5, and translate data into graphical elements
• Video journalism and the ability to work both on and behind the camera and produce high-quality video worth watching
• Web production skills and the ability to understand and maximize excellent presentation of content online and on tablet devices
• SEO and digital headline writing and display text skills
• Multi-media commissioning and story planning
• Innovative and entrepreneurial: Thinking of new ways to engage readers and draw them into specialised content and to new commercial possibilities.

The conference, which drew editors from around the world to Hamburg, continues Thursday and Friday. The conference programme can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/events/11th-international-newsroom-summit.

Alden Global Capital have continued to expand their media holdings by aquiring 100% of Journal Register Co., a company in which already a previous stakeholder. Although detailed information about the company's financial situation was not disclosed, the takeover effectively allows Journal Register a way to clear its debts.

Journal Register Co. brings local news to 19.5 million users each month via the medium of its 350 multi-platform products. It recently made waves with its groundbreaking Newsroom Cafe, which acted as a public space where employees and the public could mingle and also included a library which made 134 years worth of newspaper archives available to all.

The investment firm Alden Global Capital also owns MediaNews, Philadelphia Media Network and Tribune Co. and today Poynter has reported that Alden Global may also be competing to buy Sandiego Union-Tribune and Freedom Communications, 40% of which it supposedly already owns.

Former CEO of PPF Media and founder of the Nase Adresa project Roman Gallo told the World Editors Forum the hyperlocal news project covering four regions in the Czech Republic, which, before its recent closure, had been intended to expand to cover the whole country.

Nase Adresa, or 'our address,' consisted of three main directions of development including weekly newspapers, websites and coffeeshop-newsrooms, where journalists were entirely accessible to their audience. Community content collected there was a "basic building block" of the project, Gallo said.

According to Gallo's speech, there were three main motivations behind the news cafes: a place for the creation for community content, a marketing tool and a financial contribution to the project. "We planned 30 percent of content to be created by various communities or in cooperation with communities."

"After the unexpected closure of the project, of course I don't feel very positive, but I've learned a lot," Gallo noted. He emphasized the fact that some expectations, such as the idea that only local content will work, were proven right. "Our mistake was underestimating the complexity," he said, and they only partially reached their goal of having one local team with no walls between them.