The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) 2007 World Young Reader Conference and Expo, called “Making New Connections”, is currently underway in Washington, DC.

The conference began yesterday and goes until tomorrow, bringing together 400 participants from 74 countries to fight newspapers’ decline among young readers and discuss strategies, both in print and online, that newspapers use to increase youth readership.

WAN awarded the World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year prize to the Times of India during a ceremony yesterday. In addition to taking the top award, The Times was also awarded the World Young Reader Prize in the Newspapers in Education category, which honored its effective use of the newspaper as a teaching tool.

"Reading & Learning," a series of Newspapers in Education (NIE) guides that target diversity as a core element of NIE, has also been unveiled at the conference. The three-part series includes guides for newspaper executives, NIE coordinators and teachers. The guides, in English or Spanish, are available by request to nie@wan.asso.fr.

A book released today, "News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change" written by Tim Porter and Michele McLellan and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, aims to teach newsrooms how to innovate.

"We have a model of leadership that's set up for a static industry, and right now we're in a very dynamic and changing one," says McLellan. “News, Improved” suggests a solution: strategic training, training that educates entire staffs toward specific goals while carefully measuring success and failure.

In 2002, a Knight survey of journalists found that eight in 10 journalists wanted more training than they were getting; now, the number has increased to nine in 10. The new survey also shows that journalists want specific, practical training, such as sessions on how to use multimedia storytelling tools. They also prefer training to occur outside the newsroom.

"The news industry trains people as badly as a fast-food diet nourishes them," the authors write. "Training is episodic rather than continuous. Random, rather than strategic. Long on talk. Short on measurable impact."

For the past four years, Knight has funded the Newsroom Training Initiative, consisting of six specific training programs including one online distance-learning project.

This morning brought news that further convinced bloggers of print’s demise; 30-year-old magazine InfoWorld confirmed rumors that the publication will become digital-only in April. Newspaper industry insiders, however, don’t agree.

Jason Lee Miller of Web Pro News responded to naysaying bloggers today by interviewing some insiders and by compiling his own list of 10 reasons why print’s not dead.

David Greer, Member Services Director for the Kentucky Press Association, said that in his home state, small local papers’ circulations are up. “Content is still king,” he said. If you have the content then the platform you have to distribute that content is still secondary."

In the US, newspapers thrive in small communities, where people remain loyal to the local paper. Small papers contain news about local people and issues close to the hearts of residents. Online news usually cannot provide this intimacy.

In February, Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study showing that most of those polled still preferred newspapers to reading news online or on other media platforms. People preferred the tactile, leisurely experience of reading an actual paper.

Broadcast newsrooms are using flexible new software and methods to restructure and distribute content to many platforms without hiring new staff to do so; since many newspapers are looking to do the same; here is some specific software advice from Broadcasting & Cable.

“The newsroom system now has to be able to support RSS feeds and broadcasting to mobile phones. You have more and more distribution methods, but customers want to use the same amount of people, if not less," says Johnathon Howard, director of on-air product management for software company Avid.

Some recent, print journalist-friendly innovations are:

- Avid Active Content Manager – Allows user to separate content from display, so one can write once but publish to several websites or mobile phone platforms

-Apple Final Cut Studio – Editing and graphics software, allows user to repurpose a piece of content for the web, podcasts, etc.

- Vizrt Viz-Multi-Platform Suite – Links with Vizrt’s broadcast-graphics tools, delivers real-time graphics and video to the Web and mobile devices. May provide opportunity to deliver advertising as well as news graphics.

- Chyron WAPSTR System – Allows user to upload still images and videos from mobile phones directly to a newsroom. Useful for bringing in user-generated content.

In the Newsroom Barometer, three questions revolved around editors’ views about the new challenges and opportunities for newspapers that have emerged with new forms of journalism, such as free papers, citizen journalism and online news. Far from resenting these forms, senior news executives embraced them.

This is perhaps one of the most important findings of the Newsroom Barometer: all the talk about newspapers and news executives being scared of new media, citizen journalism and user-generated content was misplaced.

What best describes your view of free newspapers and their place in your market?

Instead of fearing the competition of citizen journalism, the vast majority of editors welcome it (79%, see question 2). Perhaps more significantly, only 5% of respondents view new media journalism as a threat. More editors than not now consider free papers as ‘real’ newspapers, as part of the transition towards the audience’s changing habits.

Respondents from large newspapers (200k+ circulation) were much less concerned about free papers as a threat (21%), compared to those from smaller papers (<200k: 32%). Large newspapers simply have the resources to fight off free paper competition, or even produce their own version.
Although the free paper model emerged in Norway and Sweden, respondents from Western Europe, which have a long tradition of paid-for dailies, were more likely to view free papers as a threat, 42%, while other world regions welcomed the emergence of freesheets.

The Newsroom Barometer also gave editors and senior news executives a chance to reveal their priorities within the newsroom. Most (innovative) editors wanted to retrain their journalists in new media, although a good share also stuck to traditional strategies such as hiring more journalists.

If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first in the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated how necessary modernization has become for the newspaper industry: the answer by 36% of the respondents was to train their staff in new media, loosely followed by more journalist recruits, at 23%.
Smaller papers (circulation <200k), while slightly less focused on new media, still prioritized it 34% of the time. Larger newspapers, with a circulation of 200K+, put even more emphasis on new media, 41%, presumably because digital activities have long been recognized as the fastest-growing assets and the strategic focus for cross-platform multimedia companies.
South and North America were the most focused on new media (47% and 46% respectively). Asia and Western Europe, usually considered as proponents of new media, were surprisingly below average (31% and 35% respectively) – they were concerned with ‘old-fashioned’ solutions, such as retraining journalists in ‘traditional skills’ (Asia) or recruiting more reporters (Western Europe).

If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do second in the newsroom?

In this section, John Zogby, CEO of Zogby International, and Jeff Jarvis, new media proponent and founder of Buzzmachine, comment on the results of the Newsroom Barometer. Both found that editors’ optimism and open-mindedness to new media was a clear indication that newspapers were embracing the digital revolution, yet Jarvis fears that may not be enough…

Indeed, Jarvis believes “one of the biggest threats to the future of newspapers is not the internet, Craig’s List, or freesheets but, indeed, some editors themselves – those who have resisted change and missed so many of the opportunities technology provides to expand journalism.”

One of the main challenges in the evolution will be to let go of a traditional and well-respected medium, paper. “It is time to go the next step, to stop defining ourselves by our medium, paper, and to start defining ourselves by our service: journalism,” says Jarvis.

So Jarvis points towards the obvious, but essential, realization that newspapers now sell a professional service, accurate content, rather than a package (although they sell the package too).

Richard Riordan, mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001, has criticized the LA Times’ day-to-day presentation and content.

Riordan said that the front page and its feature column are “badly laid out and boring”, the Iraq coverage “repetitive,” and news stories often irrelevant. Above all, he criticizes Tribune Co., the owners of the Times, for cutting staff and allowing quality to suffer in recent years. In reaction to the presence of a new editor from Chicago, Riordan said, "We miss having a cheerleader, who brings all of the pieces in the city together."

To be fair, Riordan also called the Times a “very 1970’s liberal newspaper” and said that the paper had not been fair to him during his tenure. Riordan even once considered creating a paper to rival the Times, eventually abandoning the project. Though it’s hard to tell how much of his criticism comes from this resentment, it echoes that of media critics, who say that the staff cuts come at a time when the Times and all newspapers need to concentrate on generating quality content to keep circulation up.

Source: MarketWatch through Ifra Executive News Service

As video news on the Web gains popularity, newspapers are realizing that they can benefit greatly from allowing their journalists to get creative with online video –an expert recently gave some tips to Media Guardian on how newspapers can move forward in the video revolution.

Michael Rosenblum is a former New York Times executive who now runs a consultancy practice that provides video journalism training all over the world. Rosenblum believes that newspapers are perfectly positioned to make online video work to their advantage since TV thus far has kept its focus on its own programming, leaving the Internet for “leftover material.”

Rosenblum said that since print reporters are used to working alone and thinking on their feet, they have a further advantage over TV reporters in web video production, as TV reporters usually work with large crews involving much setup.

He offered some advice on how newspapers can best harness these advantages.

-Avoid “televisionization”- Don’t attempt to imitate broadcast news, but instead to integrate multimedia content to produce a new kind of storytelling.

-Build more interactive Flash elements and on-screen players directly into webpages to avoid pop-ups and keep video user-friendly.

Columnist David Lazarus of the San Francisco Gate recently defended his position that newspapers should charge for online content against the host of bloggers who attacked him.

Lazarus’ disputed column suggested that newspapers could successfully charge for online content if they could come together in doing so. To do this, newspapers would have to lobby Congress for exemption antitrust laws. Lazarus sees newspapers at the edge of a "life-or-death struggle" and thinks the exemption could halp them into the digital age.

He sticks by his story in the new column, adding Fred Schiff, associate professor of communication at the University of Houston's idea of the newspaper website as a sort of virtual marketplace where free news will be a lure surrounded by ads and offers.

Many bloggers and citizen journalists responded with the idea that online content is not worth paying for and that charging for online content will turn readers off.

These two ideas are unrelated, but they can help to pull in readers at low cost. In its Sunday editions, The San Diego Union-Tribune offered football tickets for the playoffs. On the other side of the spectrum, USA Today included in its redesign a reporter index, which lists all reporters and offers a one-click access to their profile or all of their stories.

Between Dec. 31 and Jan.14, the Union-Tribune offered a pair of tickets to see the Chargers during the playoffs, within single-copy newspapers. Home subscribers could also get a chance to win tickets by filling out entry forms.

"The idea is to do fewer [promotions] in a bigger way," says George Bonaros, consumer marketing manager.

If your town isn’t big on football, there is certainly some kind of popular social event that people would be willing to spend a dollar on for a chance to participate – and read the paper.

Among USA Today’s new features is a user-friendly reporter index, which lists all journalists alphabetically. From the index, the user can access the reporter’s personal profile, or read all of his or her stories in one simple click.