Summaries from the Spanish Newspapers Publishers' Association's (AEDE) 21st annual convention
On 24 and 25 November, the Spanish Newspapers Publishers' Association (AEDE) held its 21st annual convention, this year in Zaragoza. Besides offering a programme in which numerous experts from the newspaper sector analysed current trends in the industry, the General Assembly of Members of the Association took place, during which Antoni Cambredó was elected new president of AEDE.
First round table: Wireless strategies
Jan Laurén
Arena Partners OY
Finland
In his presentation about mobile services, Laurén showed a number of initiatives that newspapers in Sweden and Finland operate as part of their regular web sites. Arena Partners is a development company owned by 14 Finnish regional newspapers.
Among the popular mobile services in Nordic countries, moblogs are getting more and more presence. Readers send in their digital pictures for publication on the site. “In this way, readers become active contributors to the website,” which not only can be a source of free content it also enhances the connection between readers and newspaper.
The reader takes a picture with his camera phone, writes a text to go with it, and sends it in as an MMS or e-mail to the publisher, who can easily integrate the content into the newspaper website. What kind of information can readers send in? Laurén suggested tips to the editor, reports of accidents and picture contests – send in the best winter landscape, or your best shot of your pet.
A special case was made for classified ads: using an MMS service to let people send in a picture of the item they wish to sell is interesting also because the sending in can at the same time be the payment mechanism. In Finland, you can charge up to 20 euros per message. And it results in content that can also be interesting to other readers to access via their mobile phone.
Gunnar Springfeldt
Göteborgs-Posten
Sweden
Springfeldt explained how his company, the Stampen group, put together a mobile strategy and urged the Spanish publishers to do the same if they are not doing it yet because “there are good reasons to bet on mobile: it will a future platform for advertising and it is extremely popular, not only in Sweden, where there are more mobile phones than Swedes, but also here in Spain, where the mobile penetration is around 99 percent," he said. So, although publishers should still not expect revenues, they should start identifying strategic issues such as connecting mobile to the regular business, stimulating interactivity with the readers, reaching out to young adults and identifying new revenues.
The flagship of the group, the Göteborgs-Posten, has already started a series of services, helped by Arena Partners, such as news alerts, cinema and restaurants guides, and subscription campaigns to the printed paper.... Springfeldt gave the publishers this advice: “Think what your possible audience – from a 18-year-old girl, through a manager on his thirties to a working mother who is 40 – could be interested in, and offer it to them through their mobiles, no matter if it is a coupon to get a free beer in the trendiest pub, the results of the Champions League or a recipe...”
Ali Fenwick
Netsize
Holland
Ali Fenwick of Netsize Nederland said going mobile is all about adding value by presenting premium content and having location-based services at the right time. Interactivity is crucial in his view.
He described the mobile phone as a Swiss army knife, combining many different functions, and showed how new uses are being developed all the time.
Netsize runs mobile services for many media clients, including broadcasters and entertainment companies. “Going mobile is about adding value, and you cannot predict what people find valuable, you have to test it. You have to give readers the chance of sending their opinion to the newspaper through the mobile, or even of informing about what has happened to them, directly, as many people, who were unlucky witnesses of the London bombings, did. You have to give them news through SMS and MMS because most of the mobile phones out there can display these services, but also you have to prepare and start offering mobile Internet... because the mobile is the future, because people are used and willing to pay for mobile services and because through their mobiles we can get profiles of our audiences,” explained Fenwick.
Torry Pedersen
Verdens Gang
Norway
With the incredible figures that Verdens Gang gets (1,356,000 readers of the newspaper; 926,000 readers for its website and 58,000 readers for its mobile site), it is not surprising that Torry Pedersen’s presentation was eagerly awaited. And he did not disappoint the audience. He explained how VG has managed to transform readers into contributors and how the mobile services they launch become a great success. “The afternoon in which a ship with 18 people sunk in a very remote area of Norway, the first thing we did was looking on the Internet for a map of the area. Secondly, we look, also on the web, for a phone directory of the nearest town to the accident, and last we called, one by one, to everybody in this town and asked them to help us to get photos of the catastrophe. Fifteen minutes later we had some pictures already on our web,” recalled Pedersen.
And this is only an example of the many ones this paper -- who found out about the tsunami in Asia before a newswire reported about it, thanks to some of the surviving Norwegians who are readers of VG and who sent to the 2200 messages with photos and information about this tragedy -- can tell about integrating citizen journalism. “This kind of service has made our brand and news ubiquitous, more appreciated. We have attracted many young people to our services, and we already offer radio and television through the mobile phones,” Pedersen said. Listening to him, one feels that the future is here, or at least in Norway.
Second round table: New trends in advertising
Simon Lindberg
Swedish Dailies Association
Sweden
Lindberg presented a study coordinated by the Swedish Dailies Association in which the way a reader’s eyes look at newspaper advertisements was examined. The conclusions of this study show “how the readers remember 50 percent of the ads they have looked at and that characteristics like the interest the product or service advertised has for the reader, the easiness of the message and the emotions this message provokes in the reader influence the possibilities this reader has to remember a determined advertising.”
Arnout van Damme
De Persgroep
Belgium
The Belgian newspaper group De Persgroep, which publishes newspapers in the Dutch speaking area of the country, has done an ad recognition study to increase advertisers and media agencies’ interest for the newspaper medium. “The results of our study show that to get the attention of the readers, advertising in a printed newspaper must: show the product in a real life situation; use people; use text – but in thrifty way; use colour as a background and it should be used with a teaser in the cover page.” De Persgroep has shared these conclusions with their advertisers and has even offered them some advice to improve their efficiency.
Staffan Hultén
RAM
Norway
In a brainstorming session with some friends, Hultén decided to create a database that will store thousands of readers’ opinions about the advertising they find in the dailies they read to get empiric data of the true value of newspapers as an advertising medium. Today, this database has more than 2 million individual opinions about hundreds of thousands of ads that have appeared in the newspapers. “One of the more funny things we have found out is that newspapers sell some ads too cheap while others are too expensive regarding what they provide, observation wise,” said Hultén.
In Hultén’s opinion, newspapers should do more scientific analysis and surveys, so the prices are based on the effect of the ad and not on its size. Also, this analysis help newspapers defend themselves in case an advertiser complains. Hultén explained how Volvo complained about the fact that a Norwegian newspaper put its front page ad, which wished readers a nice day, just below a headline that said than nine out of 10 citizens were scared about fundamentalist terrorism. The newspaper showed Volvo the results of RAM, updated every two days, which proved readers did not get a bad impression while reading this kind of contradiction, which made the Swedish car manufacturer happy.
Luis Chaves
Carat Expert
Spain
“Efficiency will be more and more important as a key to choose which medium is selected for an advertising campaign. And efficiency in newspapers can also be measured,” said Chaves to the publishers who met in Zaragoza. Although it is true that in countries like Italy or Spain television gets most part of the advertising money, it is as true that this model seems to be starting to fail. “Young people prefer new media to get informed and entertained and the number of commercials on television is so high that, in Spain for instance, there are advertising blocks that last more than 20 minutes, while it is very well known that commercials that appear after the sixth minute are not even remembered,” Chaves said.
Therefore, this is a key moment for the press to attract those unsatisfied advertisers. “Communication strategies in future will be focused on the consumer and not on the medium,” said Chaves, who encouraged newspaper publishers to make an effort to create studies that measure the efficiency of the printed ads in order to attract advertisers to their pages. New formats and the introduction of logos and watermarks in the newspaper are still not welcomed by the editorial departments of the newspapers, although they have proved to attract readers and advertisers, including those who complain about the lack of flexibility of the newspapers.
Third round table: The future of the daily papers
Julio Martínez
Diario de Navarra
Spain
The director of Diario de Navarra presented some of the challenges that the press will have to face in the near future or that it is facing already. “The truth is one of the first challenges we have in front of us. We have to look for the truth of our content, we must stop being servants of the P.R. departments of big companies and political parties, and start offering our own issues and agenda,” said Martínez. Also, Internet, free papers, citizen journalism and mobile phones are some of the elements that newspaper have to integrate in their routines in order for them become allies instead of fighting them in a vicious battle for the time of the readers.
Bieito Rubido
La Voz de Galicia
Spain
Rubido, who like Martínez and the other journalists who made up the third round table, is an experienced journalist and manager of one of the biggest regional newspapers in Spain. His presentation focused on what to do to reinvent the newspaper product. “In a moment in which newspapers lose readers, influence and prestige, the only thing we can do is reinvent ourselves with our best weapons: credibility, closeness to the readers, precision, the fact of being reference points in our communities, fidelity to a geographical area...,” said the Galician director. Rubido warned also about how dangerous is to offer more and more pages, when people have less and less time to read, and urged publishers to diversify the daily paper and recover leadership as opinion makers.
Guillermo Fatas
Heraldo de Aragón
Spain
Fatas, director of one of the newspapers that hosted this conference – Heraldo de Aragón – focused his presentation on the importance that regional and local newspapers have to inform about their communities and different personalities. Fatas, who admitted that newspapers need to change urgently to adapt themselves to the new times, urged that “this change does not put in danger the personality of the many old and well-known newspapers that make up the Spanish press.”
Miguel Ángel Liso
Grupo Zeta
Spain
Miguel Ángel Liso heard at an international conference some years ago the warning made by one of the top managers of Nokia, in which he forecasted the disappearance of newspapers in less than 10 years. Liso, however, does not think that this will happen, “at least if newspapers decide to lead the change to the new media, to the multimedia,” so these new media become newspapers’ allies instead of their enemies. If the daily papers, which own a well-known brand in their communities, do not do everything possible to lead the global demand of information, others, like Nokia or Microsoft, will do it, even though they do not have as much knowledge as newspapers do.
Fourth round table: Entrepreneurial strategies
Jim Chisholm
World Association of Newspapers
France
The WAN consultant Jim Chisholm described the various global trends that are dramatically affecting newspapers, their organisations, layout and presentation, and readership levels. Classifieds’ migration to specialised websites, compact formats, and citizen journalism are all symptoms of the changes that societies are living all over the world. Changing times are, however, times for opportunities, at least for those who are able to see these opportunities and grasp them. Chisholm said the most successful papers in 2004 had been those who took advantage of these opportunities and were attractive for female readers and distributed by all media and not only printed in paper, made use of citizens as journalists, and so on. In conclusion, Chisholm encouraged newspapers to fight together common enemies such as Google or Craig’s List, instead of dying in fratricidal battles.
Michael Grabner
Georg von Holtzbrinck Verlag
Germany
Michael Grabner said, “Our internal to-do list is to develop products according to customers’ demands. This requires utilising new market research methods and recognising the results. We need to make products for target groups, not one product for everyone. This means that you have to discard the idea of a newspaper (regional or national) that will embrace the 14-75 year old target group. You have to expand innovative competence and create a development team. You must invest much more (even if it will never be able to reach the research budget of some successful industries) and finally test concepts in the market: keep those that resonate in the market; they will be lasting successes. We have learned several things these last years after an active agenda of launches (just in the period 2004-2005, Holtzbrinck launched, among other publications, 20 Cent, Potato, ZeitWissen and News). Some of our essential findings are that opportunity exists for newspaper products with new pricing models, and also the use of the ‘newspaper decreasing costs’ model, where you launch products using existing resources.”
Federico Megna
FIEG
Italy
The Italian speaker gave an overview of the situation of the press in his country, which has many similarities with the Spanish newspaper industry. Although in both countries the readership has increased in recent years, the number of people who actually buy a newspaper has steadily decreased. In Italy, as in Spain, free papers have got a place in the preferences of the readers and the television gets the biggest part of the advertising budgets. The Italian press, like the Spanish press, has certain peculiarities and needs to modernise and reinvent itself if it wants to survive and get stronger in these changing times.
Peter Bale
Times Online
United Kingdom
Peter Bale, online editorial director for Times Online, the digital arm of The Times of London, says the company's website has enjoyed growth of some 300 percent around the world since the launch of The Times' new compact print version. This website, which is not only fed with material coming from the printed versions, has excellent content created by the online newsroom. On the other site, the sales team has also proved to be very innovative when selling advertising in the site. "Interestingly, only 46 percent of our online audience reads the print edition, which gives a lot of potential to win that other 54 percent over to print. But it also shows us that there are very specific audiences out there that we can reach through very specific targeting in our web operations, whether it be with blogs, vertical sites or more."
Juan Miguel Ramos
Deloitte
Spain
Upon request by the Spanish Dailies Publishers' Association, the consulting group Deloitte made a survey of all the newspaper members of the organisation to find out the level of security of the IT systems in the newspaper houses. Some of the conclusions presented by Ramos were that “around 53 percent of the people say that in their newspaper they have an emergency plan for cases in which security fails, and that 6 percent of the general budget is used for these purposes. On the other hand, most of the people working in newspapers think that security matters are just an issue and concern of those employees working in the IT department, instead of being a responsibility of the whole staff.”
SNAPSHOTS
The roundtable on wireless strategies brought together leading personalities in the media industry: Ali Fenwick of the Netsize Group gave his presentation, which was followed attentively by Jan Laurén of Arena Partners and Gunnar Springfeldt of Göteborgs-Posten, who were also speakers. 
Torry Pedersen, of Norway's VG, urged the publishers to make use of citizen journalism on their web sites. 
During the coffee breaks, conversation focused on the presentations. 
The roundtable on advertising (from left to right): Simon Lindberg of the Swiss Newspaper Association, Arnout van Damme of Belgium's Persgroep, chairman Enrique Yarza, Staffan Hultén of RAM, and Luis Chaves of Carat Expert. 
The convention also offered opportunities to taste excellent food and chat with colleagues. 
The new AEDE President, Antoni Cambredó (right), talks with two colleagues. 
Jim Chisholm, WAN consultant, left, and Michael Grabner of the Georg von Holtzbrinck group spoke about trends in publishing. In the middle, Juan Ignacio Alfonso of Diario del Alto Aragón, who chaired this round table. 
Federico Megna (standing), of FIEG, explained the situation of the Italian newspaper industry, while Peter Bale of Times Online explained how the English newspaper was successful on the web.
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