17th World Editors Forum
Günter Grass to address world’s newspaper editors
The Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass has joined the programme of the 17th World Editors Forum (WEF), to be held in Hamburg, Germany, from October 06 to 08 this year. He will make a presentation about his memoir, Mein Jahrhundert (My Century), and engage in a question and answer session at the WEF conference, the annual global meeting for the world’s editors-in-chief and other senior newsroom executives. Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, is known for his political engagement with issues such as the Nazi past, the arms race, environmentalism, racism, and the unification of Germany.
The World Editors Forum calls 2010 ‘The Tablet Year’ and has dedicated much of its annual conference to how mobile distribution is changing the news business. But the conference does not neglect traditional newspapers: the WEF has announced that Giovanni di Lorenzo, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit and one of Germany’s best-known journalists, will present a keynote address on ‘Why I Believe in Print’. Lorenzo argues that as long as editors are unable to sufficiently monetize digital content, they should work even harder to defend and diversify print. He is not opposed to technological progress: he will also talk about the promise the iPad and other tablets hold for newspapers.
Other World Editors Forum speakers would include: Bart Brouwers, managing editor for hyperlocal Online Media at the Telegraaf Media Group in the Netherlands, who will talk about using crowd-sourcing and social networks in hyperlocal news; Rainer Esser, publisher of Die Zeit (the leading weekly newspaper in Germany), to speak about content monetization; Claudio Giua, director of development and innovation at Gruppo Editoriale l’ Espresso in Italy, to lead a special workshop on ‘Our News and Google News: How Can We Cooperate?’; Eric Hazan, a partner with McKinsey & Company, who will present the WEF-McKinsey 2010 Newsroom Barometer, a survey of editors-in-chief from around the world; Sylvie Kauffmann, editor-in-chief of France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, who will participate in a session on new storytelling models for newspapers in the digital age; Edward Roussel, digital editor for the Telegraph Media Group in the United Kingdom, who has been involved in restructuring the Telegraph’s newsroom over the past four years, increasing the newspaper group’s focus on digital media; Paul Steiger, the editor-in-chief and founder of ProPublica in the United States and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, to speak about new ways to fund quality journalism; Alfredo Triviño, director of creative projects for News International in the United Kingdom, to talk about new content platforms and their value for newspaper companies; Gregor Waller, vice president for strategy & innovation and a board member of Axel Springer’s WELT Group in Germany, to speak about new content platforms and whether they represent a breakthrough for newspaper companies; etc.
The conference will provide editors with new business models, an overview of trends in the industry, and practical information they can use in their newsrooms today. The World Editors Forum will run alongside the IFRA Expo, the leading international exhibition of the news publishing and media industries. In addition to the global exhibition, the expo in Hamburg features several conferences, seminars and meetings for news executives.
