WAN Congress 2009 starts with lively panel sessions

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I landed in Hyderabad, the city of nawabs, early morning on 30 November 2009 to attend a four day event organized by the World Association of Newspapers. The weather was pleasant and people warm and helpful which certainly is a brownie for the city considering the number of foreign delegates who came down to attend the prestigious event.

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• Delegates at The Annual Press Freedom Round Table, Photo: Aakriti Agarwal, IPP

The WAN Congress started on 30 November 2009 with rather lively and dynamic sessions on three subjects namely
– Free Press? What good is a mission without a business?
-- The internet a maturing medium and,
--Winning strategies for engaging the young – especially in hard times.

All the sessions were very interesting and engaging. The discussion on the forum of ‘Free Press? What good is a mission without a business?’ not only reflected the state of journalism and the press in many parts of the world but also revealed the atrocities that journalists and newspapers go through in order to present a true and genuine story to its readers.

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• Participants of the Round tables, Photo:Aakriti Agarwal, IPP

The panel in this session included Trevor NCube, publisher of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian weekly newspaper, (part of The Guardian newspaper group) and in Zimbabwe, sister publications - The Zimbabwe Independent and The Sunday Standard; Chris Elliot of Guardian Media Group, UK; Najam Sethi, Editor-in-Chief of Friday Times, Pakistan (who will be awarded Golden Pen of Freedom Award 2008 at the Hyderabad event); Sasa Vucinic, Managing Director of Media Development Loan Fund, who also moderated the session; Ahmed Benchemsi, publisher and Managing Editor of Tel Quel of Morocco; Irina Samokhina, CEO of Krestyanin, Russia; and Jose Rubbar Zamora, publisher of El Periodico, Guatemala.

The conference was very well attended by delegates from across the world and was followed by questions from the audience, thus making it an interesting discussion and interactive session. There were repeated rounds of applause in appreciation of the astonishing facts, the tricks by Benchemsi and atrocities on journalists.

Chris Elliot explained, “The Guardian lives on this planet with everyone else here, and we are subject to structural decline and recession. . . The editorial and commercial purpose should be a happy marriage. . . We need to have a coherent commercial strategy,  he said. Talking about the Guardian Trust, Elliot said that the aim of trust is not to make profits but to help The Guardian. Reflecting on the revenue model, he explained -- in the old model, the main revenue of 60 per cent for broadsheet used to come from advertisements and 40 per cent from the cover price. In the year after Rupert Murdoch’s price cutting strategy in the UK, that balance was tipped further to advertising and 70 per cent came from advertising. Now in times of recession, after drops in advertising and changes in price structure, more than 50 per cent of revenue comes from the cover price. He agreed that people in UK have not wanted to throw a lot of money for newspapers and said that newspapers alone are not how readers experience journalism. “At The Guardian, we believe that its about journalism and not about the medium so we will continue with the print-web strategy,” says Elliot.

Reflecting on her newspaper, Irina Samokhina explained that the idea to start Kretyanin was to make a newspaper for people living in the countryside and to carry information that other newspapers did not carry. Now when other newspapers have been introduced too, Samokhina says that the only way to compete is with content. Tariffs, she says, cannot be competed with because other newspapers are often distributed for free or are very low priced. Rubber Zamora says that in business, trust and confidence is built and reputation guaranteed. He says that written media is just another channel and is based on credibility. The survival of newspapers is not based on readers but on avid readers.

In spite of six-seven attempts to kill Jose Rubber Zamora, threatening messages and calls, physical torture, grenades thrown at his residence, children who have suffered various disorders and some of whom have moved out of the country, he says that in spite of all this and much more, he pursues journalism because this is where he is supposed to be. Elliot agrees that journalists are in greater physical threat than ever before.

Najam Sethi talking about Pakistan said that things began to change for the better when the economy began to grow at 6 to 7 per cent and General Musharaff opened the air waves which meant that television could be run. Now the economy is growing at 2 per cent so revenue is less and government has become a main advertiser so media has no choice but to listen to the government. “I have faced threats from my own colleagues. . . There is a lot of democracy and very little censorship of media now in Pakistan. The real threat comes from non-state actors and not from the state. We have received several direct threats from non-state actors and it is very serious because they are very powerful and the state cannot protect you from them. There was a stage when the situation was so bad, we were getting daily threats from them. Public opinion began to change when they were attacked by the terrorists so now the tide has turned against the non-state actors. The circulation of English media is not affected because it targets the elites of the country but Urdu newspaper circulation gets affected because it touches the ordinary people and its like pushing the envelope. We were accused of being secular enemies of state. The second thing the Taliban objected to was a page dedicated to Indian and Pakistan actors because they said that there are too many pictures of good looking women and that’s what is driving the sales of the paper.”

Solidarity emerged as a very important aspect for media and protecting journalists. Sethi spoke about the South Asia Media Commission and South Asia Pre-Media Association of Journalists whose aim has been to travel across South Asia and checkthe persecution of journalists by media monitors, and draw attention to abuse of media by state and non state actors. Other panelists agreed and said that there should be support from different organizations that care about free media health. Financial assistance and safe environment for journalists came out as most important issues from the discussion.

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