Brazil's Zero Hora Featured at Young Reader Conference

Brazil's Zero Hora, the 2009 Young Reader Newspaper of the Year, knows a lot about how to ensure a future audience by creating indispensable print content in combination with smart digital approaches that appeal to young readers.

The paper succeeds by engaging younger readers and those who influence media loyalties, without alienating older readers. It will share its strategies during a "Total Youth Think"; session at the 8th World Young Reader Conference and Expo, to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, from 27 to 30 September.

There is still time to register: full details of the conference, organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), can be found at http://www.wan-press.org/prague2009 [1].

Total Youth Think is an approach to staffing, content, platforms and attitudes that places young people at the centre of a newspaper company's strategy. The conference will feature lessons from both big and small newspapers that have successfully adopted the strategy.

Speakers include:

  Ricardo Stefanelli, the Director of Zero Hora, on the latest projects that won it the top prize in the 2009 World Young Reader Prize competition. The southern Brazilian newspaper has a 78 percent penetration rate among 20- to 29-year olds in its market, and a 71 percent penetration rate among those aged 15 to 19.

  Anne Kari Jacobsen, Chief Analyst for A-Pressen Group in Norway, who will discuss how the group's local newspapers have used an array of young reader strategies, including creating youth newsrooms, conducting surveys of young people, providing resources for teachers and daily help for editors.

  Grzegorz Piechota, Special Projects Editor for Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, which is conducting a strategy to link generations through the newspaper. "It's better to make a newspaper relevant to both young and old readers rather than make a ghetto like a youth section,"; he says. "We had been doing that, but nobody liked it. Young readers felt they were not treated seriously enough, and old readers could not stand trivial content in their serious newspaper.";

  Boris Trupčević, General Manager for 24sata in Croatia, who will explain how the youth-led company became the market leader with a newly launched newspaper and website, and completed its multimedia strategy with a news TV channel.

The "Total Youth Think"; session will be chaired by Danièle Fonck, Deputy Director General of Editpress in Luxembourg, whose own newspapers employs the strategy.

The Total Youth Think model and successful cases will also be examined by the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Project's first report of its 2009 series, "Publishing to Targeted Audiences." Participants will receive the chapter of the report on Total Youth Think as part of their registration fee.

The conference is supported by Norske Skog, the Norway-based global paper producer, and the Czech Publishers Association. Other partners include Smart technologies, DHL, People in Need, the Prague Lord Mayor's office and the European Journalism Centre.

Suppliers to the newspaper industry who are interested in joining the exhibition can find details here [2].

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, is the global organisation of the world's newspapers and news publishers, representing more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, WAN-IFRA, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: larry.kilman@wan-ifra.org [3].