How has the news media industry weathered the lingering pandemic globally over the past year? Where will publishers invest next year and beyond, and what are the trends driving publishers’ critical decisions? These are just a few bottomline issues that will be addressed in this opening session.

Bringing the power of data-driven decision making into the newsroom is critical when looking at content planning for sustainable business models. Understanding audience engagement through the lens of content can be powerful in helping design for reader revenue and direct paying relationships. Find out how (small and medium) publishers can tap onto the Editorial Insights Tool to enable pathways for data driven content planning in newsrooms.

Talented newsroom staff are a key to building viable news organisations. What is needed to motivate, manage and keep the next generation of journalists capable of drawing the audiences you need, particularly when operating in hostile, vulnerable or high risk environments? Join WAN-IFRA Women in News Editorial Leadership Award Laureates for a roundtable discussion.

Presented by WAN-IFRA Women in News

10 trends impacting your transformation strategies in 2022 and beyond
Moderator: Dean Roper, Director of Insights
Speaker: Adam Bird, Senior Partner and the Global Leader, Consumer Tech & Media, McKinsey

Adam Bird advises the top management of the most disruptive and disrupted companies on their most critical business issues, spanning all major media, entertainment and consumer technology segments. As publishers ramp up their digital transformation strategies going forward, the global trends shaping their business plans proves critical.

CEO panel: The perspectives of JP/Politikens Hus and Schibsted
Moderator: Alexandra Borchardt
Speakers: Stig Orskov, CEO JP/Politikens Hus; Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO, Schibsted Media

As the the pandemic lingers, these two leading publishers will share their insights, experiences, and strategies on how their companies have fared during the crisis, discuss the critical issues and trends impacting their business, and the way forward in the next few years.

Having a sustainable business – the thorn in most news publishers’ side for years now. Then there are those publishers whose transformation efforts were already bearing fruit before the pandemic and it just accelerated their plans. These publishers delivered excellent top and bottom-line results in the last few years, restructured their businesses and kept their ships on course. Top executives share their companies’ successes, lessons and the way forward for them.

Looking for new digital tools for your workplace? Heard of solutions that other publishers use? The Solutions Showcase is where you’ll get the opportunity to get a peek at the tools and technology others are talking about. Each speaker will present a 5-minute demo, after which you are welcome to visit their booth at our virtual marketplace, collect brochures and links, and even have a text chat or face-to-face online call with them!

Meet the innovators who have converted distribution challenges into opportunities and reorganised print operations into revenue centres.

Converting Distribution Challenges into opportunities

Distribution has been a major challenge for many newspapers recently. Costs are going up and manning the distribution has been a challenge as well. JP Politiken in Denmark has allocated a number of resources into making the distribution a place of opportunities instead of challenges. Hans Peter Nissen is the head of Logistics within JP Politiken and he will present on their strategies for growth.

Creating new revenues streams for newspaper printers

In today’s competitive business environment, newspaper printers have been exploring ways to expand their production portfolio. Paul Huybrechts the managing director of Coldset Printing Partners in Belgium will discuss how his company is and will be tackling these challenges in the coming years.

Presented by WAN-IFRA World Printers Forum

To improve audience engagement rates, The Independent developed a new user-friendly strategy that’s sparking conversation and driving more registrations. Join this session to learn how Philippa and her team:

• Partnered with Viafoura to activate their audience and designed a new registration experience, leading to a 100% increase in conversions over 12 months
• Improved civility in comments with an automatic moderation tool that also frees up time to focus on other initiatives

Quick fire sessions with new ideas and best practices from around the world – including from the winners of our regional and global digital media awards!

The forces disrupting journalism and news organisations grow daily triggering questions over the journalistic method, focus and relevance at a time when societies face significant, global challenges. How are editors responding to the pressures on freedoms, finances, truth while telling the big stories of our time, such as climate change?

News media has long relied on the market to help ensure sustainability and diversity, with advertising and sales paying for the independent journalism that citizens need to make informed decisions. But the market has changed and today it is failing due to a variety of factors, posing an existential threat to many news media enterprises – everywhere.

Brought to you by WAN-IFRA Media Freedom in partnership with UNESCO

Many more hyper local stories, much faster. Freed up time for journalists. Newsroom robots are helping Scandinavian local news publishers improve their subscription offer. In this session we’ll discuss how news automation fits into the reader revenue strategy and what the daily challenges and benefits are.

The editorial engine room is morphing into something quite different from the romantic depictions of the past. With more tasks being managed by AI, more engineers on the newsroom floor, more video, fewer words, and no real need to be based in a central office, what does the future newsroom look like? Case studies plus discussion

With audiences flocking to influencers for adventures, advice, news and everything in between, we take a closer look at how they have created engaging content to attract and serve new, younger and more diverse audiences. Can journalists and editors ever be influencers while maintaining editorial independence and integrity? What should the new rules of engagement be? Lend your voice to this hotly debated topic!

Join Anjali Kapoor, Director of News Partnerships at Meta for a look at how social technology is evolving at Meta. Anjali will be joined by Wahyu Dhyatmika, CEO of Indonesia’s Tempo Digital, on how his company successfully doubled down on digital to grow subscriptions in 2021.

Against a backdrop of ever-more disaster scenes across the globe, 2021 has finally seen world leaders head to Glasgow for COP26 to thrash out what we may all have to do next for the planet.

But some will remember 1992’s ‘Earth Summit’ – leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement – maybe, even, the first global environmental convention, in 1972. This is all, in some ways, old news.

Yet, the idea of ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ media, whether reporting on the environment, or the environmental impact of such reporting, may feel new.

This session will discuss:

• The industry’s response to the latest environmental talks
• The news media performance on communicating environmental stories
• The news media’s own environmental sustainability

This is session is organised by WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI)

Sam Guzik, foresight affiliate with the Future Today Institute and director of news product strategy at New York Public Radio, will explore how the future of news may unfold based on signals we are seeing today. The session will explore the implications of synthetic media, developments in natural language processing, the metaverse and more.

The Innovation in News Media Annual World Report, in association with WAN-IFRA, reveals what kinds of content triggers a subscription, 13 revenue models for publishers, the best examples of digital product innovation within newsrooms and best practice for setting up a fact checking unit to battle misinformation.

The session will be presented by Juan Senor and Ines Bravo and also feature two guest speakers who will share their experiences on the newsroom transformation at The Standard from Nairobi and how a cross platform redesign efforts at the Compass Media from Cayman Islands enhanced their audience engagement.