Global publisher association boss: traditional and new media are two ends of a burning rope
This week more than 500 of world’s top newspaper executives converged- in New York for the International News Media Association (INMA) World Congress. Nic Christensen sat down with executive director Earl Wilkinson to talk about the organisation and the challenges facing his members globally.
You mentioned in your statements to the World Congress that paywalls are a decreasing priority for your members, branded content has been a big focus of the 2015 Congress – from your perspective what is top of the agenda for publishers when it comes to revenue question?
That’s a big question. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and when I first started this you could not get executives from 45 countries on to common ground to talk about issues – advertising was different, maybe you could talk about strategy, maybe marketing but it was really hard to do.
What is interesting is that in this global village – this digital village that we have now – from Pakistan, to Sweden, to Silicon Valley everyone is on the same page. They realise they may be at different points in the evolution of media but we know we’re going the same direction from print to multimedia. If you believe Ross (Dawson) maybe digital only at some point.
