Sport on World Newspaper Congress agenda

The congress and forum, to be held from 1 to 3 December 2009 in Hyderabad, India aims to provide opportunities for attendees to learn how sports coverage is evolving in the digital age.

A workshop on multimedia strategies in sports newsrooms will examine:

• the process of integration between paper and web in sports newsrooms
  
• the possibility ­ or not - of charging readers for sports online news
  
• the rising competition from team-owned media.

Panelists include: Gianni Valenti, deputy director of Italy's largest daily (with more than 3.5 million readers), the sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport; George Brock, professor and head of journalism at City University, London, and former international editor of The Times of London; Santi Nolla, president of IASN and editor of the century-old Spanish sports daily El Mundo Deportivo; Antoine Vernholes, international director of L'Equipe, the French sports newspaper; and Eduardo Tironi, multimedia editor of the Brazilian sports media group Lance!

Another sports-related event, organised with the News Media Coalition, will illustrate the major restrictions to media coverage of sports events, and how to fight them. Discussions plan to provide insight into the editorial, press freedom and business challenges of sports news, prior to the masterclass that the IASN will organise to help journalists deal with sports rights and accreditation issues, in January 2010.

Panelists in this session include Xavier Spender, deputy director of L'Equipe and CEO of L'Equipe 24/24, which manages new media for L'Equipe TV, lequipe.fr and the group's digital radio station; Andrew Moger, executive director of the News Media Coalition; and Valtteri Niiranen, executive director of the European Newspapers' Publishers Association (ENPA).

IASN and the sports press will also be present at the annual Young Readers Round Table, with Rosarita Cuccoli, secretary general of IASN, and Eduardo Tironi of Lance!, to illustrate the initiatives that the sports press implement to attract young readers through sports.

The IASN, whose international secretariat is based in Paris, is the sports arm of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the global organisation of the world¹s 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 News Media Coalition (NMC) is an international organisation based in London that seeks to preserve the function and ability of news organisations to inform public society about major events of interest. It focuses on the specific threat to editorial operations, publishing and independent journalism deriving from excessive controls on the flow of news to the public imposed by events entities.

Inquiries on the sports-related events at the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Fourm in Hyderabad to Rosarita Cuccoli, secretary general of the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN), 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005, Paris, France, tel: +33 (1) 47 428529, fax: +33 (1) 47 424948, mobile: +33 (6) 88 863247 or email .

More information on IASN can also be found at www.press-iasn.org.

Full details of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress, 16th World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo 2009, the global meetings of the world's press organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), can be found at www.wanindia2009.com.