14th October 2008

On 9-10 October annual IFRA Conference “The Future of News Publishing” took place in Rome, newspapers business innovations were the subject of the discussions. IFRA board meeting was held at the same time. Vasiliy Gatov Media3 company Adviser of the board participated in the board meeting. He was the first and exclusive Russian representative in the board of largest international trade organization, which consolidates the representatives of world print and publishing business leaders.
Members of the Board approved the results of financial and management activities of the organization and presented 2009 budget to the general meeting consideration. The main directions of IFRA development were discussed during the international Conference “The Future of News Publishing”.

Special attention was paid to the Internet side of the newspaper business and to newspapers publishers’ advantages in crisis situation under the negative influence of financial markets changes.

Patrick Keane the authoritative financial analyst, media business evaluation expert and one of  “I Media Connection” consulting company Managers described main approaches to newspaper business evaluation, crisis and post crisis processes of company capitalization. Basing on more than 700 publishing companies business research he proved that digital media share must be 15% of the total income of the company only in these conditions it can seriously influence and increase capitalization. At the same time lack of digital expertise leads to the business devaluation; companies which don’t develop Internet direction are loosing their value including crisis prise drop as well.

Second important subject of the conference covered cross-media advertising and specific examples of cross-media technologies successful implementation to increase profit of Internet advertisement basing on newspapers content. Statements of the participants showed, that new ideas can change newspaper, advertising vehicle and advertisers’ market.

The third important direction of the IFRA members work is the creation of new generation search engines. Publishers from Austria, Sweden, USA and other countries are working in this direction both in partnership and competition with Google. These search engines are based on semantic search; it allows the input of large text passages to get relevant result. The new generation search engine can define gender, age, language and approximate destination of user basing on input phrase or text. After that the user will be provided not only with the required information, but also with other useful data. Actually user will get individual digital media source.

The participants of the conference paid special attention to the report of publishers from India. It’s the only market in the world where newspapers print-run and advertising income are growing.

IFRA is world leading newspaper and media technologies Association. It was established at the same time with beginning of newscolor age in 1964. The Association’s aim is to assist all the interested parties (publishers, equipment and information technologies suppliers, advertising agencies and advertisers) to find mutual solution of up-to-date technological and marketing question. Today IFRA is the central world conference to discuss current tendencies and further media technologies, printing and publishing business directions.