Publish Asia, the annual meeting place of the Asian news publishing industry which takes place in Dubai from 18 to 20 April, has chosen the tagline ‘Strengthening Print in the Digital Era’ as its main theme for this year’s event. Its already strong conference programme— featuring over 30 speakers, 11 conference sessions and 4 workshops or masterclasses—has recently been consolidated with notable additions to both its print and digital components.
Despite having been written off countless times in the past, the printed newspaper stubbornly refuses to die: “Print is old, but not obsolete,” says Wan-Ifra’s Manfred Werfel, who will present findings from a recently published study on the Print-Online Performance Gap. An agile, multiplatform strategy is therefore the only way forward to satisfy the audience ever-shifting consumption habits.
On the print side, Publish Asia 2017’s session dedicated to ‘New print products and production strategies’ will feature a case study from the Rheinische Post, a German daily which successfully converted its printing center into a profitable commercial printing company. Fairfax Media, in Australia, operated a similar conversation in the frame of a large scale restructure of its print operations across the country.
A new breakout session titled ‘Innovations in Print’ will also showcase a case study from Star Media Group, which has been able to protect its revenue from print advertising in challenging times more efficiently than most of its competitors thanks to focus on in-house innovations in print. This session will also present the new products and commercial strategies that inkjet newspaper printing can unleash and the presentation of an industry-wide initiative for reducing paper waste and increasing economic and environmental performances.
On the digital side, Publish Asia 2017’s sessions dedicated to ‘Next Level Journalism’ (with speakers from The Guardian, The New York Times, Google Cloud or Facebook) and ‘Making Sense with Data’ (with speakers from NRC Media, Fairfax and SPH) have just been completed by a joint closing keynote presentation by Sirgoo Lee, the former chief executive officer of Korea’s instant messaging app KakaoTalk and Changhee Park, chief operating officer of South Korea’s leading multimedia publisher, JoongAng Ilbo, on the challenges of the digital transformation for legacy publishers.
