The Wan-Ifra 2014 conference for newspaper publishers from Asia is due at the Le MeridienNew Delhi on 17 to 18 September. This year Ifra brings to the table around 40 speaker s from India and abroad with its three parallel sessions of newsroom summit, printing summit and cross media advertising summit. The conference is expected to be attended by 400 member delegates and will be preceded by three workshop programmes that are chargeable at Rs 15,000 plus taxes per person and will be conducted separately by experts arriving at the conference. These workshops will be held on 16 September and be focussed on data journalism, new media metrics and densitometry.
Newsprint waste management
The conference will see a special report on ‘Newsprint Waste Management’ authored by K Balaji, director of The Hindu detailing best practices to reduce newsprint waste and help saving cost. Newsprint wastage has been one of the prime concerns of the industry and each year the newsprint users as well as the
machinery makers push in new innovative designs that lower wastage marginally. Wan-Ifra has previously created several reports to improve the process conversion rate and reduce wastage and has developed its own process optimization guidelines with benchmarking standards. Balaji who is a known expert in the field would add to the Ifra knowledge bank.
There are several other interesting discussions in the print room summit on the first day. Sunil Patil, senior manager, and Amit
Gupta, deputy chief manager of BCCL will discuss ways to reduce energy consumption. The session could be an interesting case study that would focus on the untapped areas of energy conservation. This would be followed by a session on the challenge of using FM screening for high pigmented ink on 42 gsm newsprint by Snehasis Roy, head of AVP manufacturing. Among the events of interest in the the post lunch session on the first day is a case study on print production planning from newsroom to delivery by Rolf Wuthrich, head post press Ringier Print Adligenswil Switzerland.
Sharing green solutions and global trends Â
The second day at the print room summit will be flagged off by Michael Buckley, consultant PEFC Singapore, and focus on the building of a supply chain that sources newsprint that originates from sustainably managed forests. This would be followed by a session on hazardous waste management by K Srinivas, head planning and technical, Ramky Enviro Engineers, and one on cost saving by Anand Srinivas, research engineer at Wan-Ifra.
There are two sessions on digital printing one by Stefaan Vanysacker, project manager at Halewijn, a digitally printed Belgium newspaper. This could be of interest to multiple edition newspapers with short print runs. The second digital press session is an update on digital press technology from the big press manufacturers like Fujifilm, Kodak and manroland.
Google and the news publishers love hate story continues as they build traffic for better networking and Kartik Taneja, head channel sales Google and Florian Nehm, head corporate sustainability Axel Springer delve on the issues involved. DD Purakayastha, CEO, ABP will discuss benchmarking operations in the newspaper industry while Vincent Peyregne, CEO, Wan-Ifra France, will talk about global trends and share key findings from its annual report.
It is all about digital  Â
Surprisingly newsroom learning has suddenly become all about digital transformation with basics of quality newsroom content creation and editing being missed out. It is not that content creation has attained a perfect 10 score and does not need deliberation and improvement. As a matter of fact the quality of content is dropping rapidly in almost every segment as more and more content gets outsourced from news agencies and third party content aggregators. Even the largest selling newspapers have skewed content and questionable quality besides glaring typos that used
to be absent even a decade ago. What sells is not news but the catchy headlines, color, glamour and the packaging, especially with the emphasis having shifted from quality of content to the distribution mode and the reading medium.
Wan-Ifra has an exclusive digital media event focussed on digital learning. It is time that the Ifra annual conference talked about improving content quality and not only about delivering the content seamlessly through digital media.
The Wan-Ifra 2014 sessions will have a digital story telling session by Kevin Anderson, regional executive editor of Gannett Wisconsin Media, focussed on developing device specific content, followed by a digital transformation session by Mariam Mammen Mathew, COO, Manorama Online. Andrew Holden, editor in chief of The Age, Australia, will deliver a discourse on the metered paywall while R Sukumar, editor, Livemint of HT Media, will talk of the web first approach in an integrated newsroom. The second day’s newsroom sessions would start with a session on learning with the news by Serene Goh, editor-schools, The Straits Times, Singapore. This would be followed by two sessions on learning through news by Basant Rathore, head brand strategy, Jagran and Anupam Aashish, head Y-Vertical ABP.
Brand building and advertising
Rahul Kansal, executive president, Bennett Coleman group will deliver the inaugural lecture on strategies to keep advertisers and readers loyal to the brand. Shantanu Bhanja, VP marketing, HT Media, will deliver a lecture on alliances for negotiating with advertisers. Kedare Gavane, director, comScore, will talk on digital trends that are shaping advertising.
The second day’s session of the cross media summit will start with a discourse from Nikhil Ganju, country head, Trip Advisor, one of the large global travel sites. He will share his experience on the power of digital advertising, and show how newspapers can gain from the experience. Jackie Ventoni, director of training, The Byrne Partnership, will address the session on building a new age sales team for integrated media selling. AJ Christopher, national head marketing, Eenadu, will talk on increasing the band presence by hosting social events in context of the Eenadu cricket tournament.
