World newspaper congress opens

Newspaper executives and editors gathered in India from around the world Tuesday heard calls to seek more payment for their content on the internet as they decried their industry's sharply falling advertising revenues.
'This is a critical moment in our industry. ... If we don't dare to take these first steps, no one else will,' said Andreas Wiele, board member and president of BILD Division and Magazines Axel Springer AG Germany.
He also said newspapers must demand of search engines 'fair share, fair search,' meaning that content providers should be compensated even for very short strings of content and the search results should not be manipulated unfairly against the original content providers.
The World Newspaper Congress in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad was attended by senior media executives including Les Hinton, the chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co.; David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal counsel of Google Inc.; and Antoine Vernholes, the international director of the French sports daily L'Equipe.
In North America PriceWaterhouse Coopers has predicted that by 2013, combined print and digital revenues will be less than print-only advertising revenues in 2008, said Timothy Balding, the Joint Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, which organised the three-day conference that ends (today) Thursday.
'One thing is sure, unless we protect and commercially exploit our high value content, the journalistic standards so important to our readers and to society will no longer be financially viable,' he added in his world newspaper trends report.
But Balding said that despite predictions about the death of newspapers, 'they actually continue to grow, at least on the global scale.’