STAR joins top Asian papers for Publish Asia meet

The Philippine STAR and three other leading broadsheets in the country will join other top newspapers from the Asian region for a two-day conference in Manila through which they hope to find ways to keep up with the stiff competition presented by online media and find solutions to dropping newspaper readership levels.

IFRA Asia, the event’s main organizer, will hold its Publish Asia 2007 Conference at the Manila Hotel on March 27 and 28. This year’s theme is "Reinventing for Today’s Business, Creating for Tomorrow’s Challenges."

Expected to participate in the event are some 400 delegates and 300 local participants from leading newspapers throughout the region, including the chief executive officers, presidents, chief operating officers, general managers, editors and writers of these publications. This is the first time that the Philippines will host the event.

At yesterday’s press launch, IFRA Asia managing director Elaine Wong said: "We promise this (will be an) exciting, colorful and productive conference."

IFRA prepared several topics that aim to provide insights for participants on ways by which they can deal with the evolving publishing industry.

Instead of looking at non-traditional media, such as online publications and Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo! as competitors, publishing companies should seek to find ways to utilize these websites to their advantage.

The IFRA Asia-Pacific committee is made up of representatives from member-countries who are in a good position to paint an accurate picture of the state of the newspaper business. "We wanted topics to come from the industry," Wong said.

Some of the topics that will be discussed are strategies for integration, staying ahead, product diversification, integrated newsrooms, launching a community site, search engine strategies for newspapers and mobile publishing.

Other strategy discussions will cover building across media advertising, the multi-media sales model, the Google economy, online classifieds and competing for advertisers’ budgets.

Manila Bulletin public relations officer Barbie Atienza, who is a member of the Publish Asia Philippines committee, said: "In an industry where there are a lot of challenges, the only way to go is to keep on learning."

Atienza said learning should not be limited to one’s country, but that there should be an exchange of ideas between colleagues from other countries.

Wong said one of the things that surprised foreign media is the mobile phone text phenomenon in many parts of Asia, including the Philippines: "The SMS (short messaging system) is one of the heaviest in the world. There are lot of creative programs and contents in mobile phones. This is great because it shows that Asian publishers are more open to learning. In Europe, they are more traditional."

During the gathering, the delegates and participants will also tackle the issue of low readership statistics.

"Readership is affected by cyberspace, an alternative media," IFRA said.

Atienza said the Philippines has a population of roughly 89 million people, but only an estimated 1.5 million are fond of reading: "It’s a bad ratio."

He said the participants should look at the readership problem "not just as a business concern, but also a social concern. Hopefully, we can have a concerted effort to work together in the industry... It’s a long way to go, but there are plenty of opportunities."