The economic downturn has forced the postponement of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) annual congress and forum, the largest annual international gathering of newspaper executives and editors, MediaGuardian.co.uk has reported.
This year's annual conference for WAN and its related organisation, the World Editors Forum (WEF), was scheduled to take place March 22-25 in Hyderabad. WAN/WEF hopes to reschedule the 62nd World Newspaper Congress and 16th World Editors Forum for late November.
The Media Guardian report said: [Link]
"The economic crisis has had a devastating effect on participation in the events, which are simply not viable at this stage," Bertrand Pecquerie, World Editors Forum director said in an email seen by MediaGuardian.co.uk.
"Our belief is that newspaper companies will, by necessity, learn to live with the crisis over the year and will be more willing to invest again in conferences and travel by the end of 2009. The exact new schedule will be confirmed shortly. We need your suggestions in this difficult period."
The conference, which has previously been held in Gothenberg, Sweden, Cape Town and Moscow, is hosted jointly with a local newspaper publishers association, this year the Indian Newspaper Society, which usually takes on a large part of the fund raising and sponsorship requirements.
"Postponing two conferences – the Publishers Congress and the Editors Forum – is not the end of the world," Pecquerie told MediaGuardian.co.uk.
"It is just a management decision based on facts. A newspaper association is at the end of the chain of the newspaper industry: when managers and editors cut costs and ask not to travel, evidently conferences and seminars are the first to be threatened.
"So WAN and WEF decided to postpone to November the Hyderabad conferences, and they will be held. Remember that the headline of our 2009 Editors Forum is 'Doing More with Less', doing more content with less resources. It applied for March, as it will apply for November 2009. The Editors Forum conference is just one of our activities and it is postponed, as so many projects are in so many industries and in so many countries."
