PHOTO: S. R. RAGHUNATHAN

N. Murali, Director, Ifra, India, Reiner Mittlebach, CEO, Ifra, R.V.Rajan, Managing Director, Ifra India, and K.N. Shanth Kumar, Director and Editor, Deccan Herald at the inaugural session of the 14th annual conference of Ifra India 2006 held in Chennai on Wednesday.

CHENNAI: The publishing and newspaper industry requires new working methods to cater to audience needs, Reiner Mittelbach, CEO, Ifra, said. Media-convergent news and advertisement strategies are crucial to meet such expectations.

He was delivering the keynote address at Ifra India 2006, the 14th Ifra India annual conference and exhibition, organised by the Indian unit of Ifra, the world's leading association of newspaper and media publishing.

Integrated content bundles should replace single and stand-alone media products and services in both the editorial and the commercial categories, he suggested. Citing an example in this regard, Mr. Mittelbach said that immediately after an event, the first medium that would alert or reach the reader ought to be used — the mobile phone. This could be followed with a teaser on the Internet. After receiving readers' inputs and accounts from citizen-journalists, a comprehensive story could later be published in newspapers.

Content bundles

This was hard to achieve, Mr. Mittelbach said. Processes must be integrated to develop such content bundles and fragmented organisational structures were incapable of performing this task, he added.

"We have to introduce new ways to think from multiple perspectives... One needs to have a clear and holistic definition of target groups," he said, adding that this would mean integrated content creation, continuous deadlines and continuous evaluation of target groups, content and media.

N. Murali, Director, Ifra India and Managing Director, The Hindu , described the media scene in India as "vibrant." He, however, added that some people preferred to call it "volatile." The country had witnessed a phenomenal growth in newspaper sales. But most of this growth was "on the back of throwaway cover prices" and advertisement buoyancy hid the distorted economics of the trade. This growth was likely to continue for a few more years, but he warned that if there was a slowdown of the economy — like what happened four to five years ago — newspapers, with their present business model, would be "in deep trouble."

He noted that even in Pakistan, the cover prices of newspapers were three times more than those in India while in Bangladesh and other countries, it was double the rates in India. It was the first time that delegates from Pakistan were attending the conference. With every passing year, the conference has become bigger, in terms of participation. There were 400 delegates and participants this year. All the 42 stalls for the exhibition were booked. R.V. Rajan, Managing Director, Ifra India, said that Chennai would host the Ifra expo next year. Co-sponsored by the Indian Newspaper Society, the two-day conference has two streams — a publishers' forum, aimed at owners and top managers, with a focus on the vision for growth and new media opportunities and, a technical forum, aimed at technical people in the publishing sector.

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