India shares its experience at Publish Asia

Alok Sanwal, Kasturi Balaji, David Bicknell and Sanat Hazra from India will speak on various trends in the publishing Industry at Publish Asia 2010

The pan-Asia publishing conference, Publish Asia 2010 that began yesterday, will witness participation from several Indian speakers.

The three-day event includes three concurrent conferences, four learning workshops and the Expo. The three conferences are CEO Conference, Newsroom Summit Asia and Printing Summit Asia, which will see a total of six sessions.

The annual event aims to provide Asian media professionals with the most relevant case studies, concepts and ideas for successfully driving their business. Representing India at the conference are Alok Sanwal, head, I next; David Bicknell, CTO, HT Media; Kasturi Balaji, managing director, Kasturi and Sons; and Sanat Hazra, technical director, Times of India.

Sanwal, head of bilingual daily, I next, published by Dainik Jagran, will speak in the session, "Reach out to New Audiences" at Newsroom Summit Asia. He will present his views on how to attract a non-serious audience to a serious product. His case study on the bilingual tabloid and its sister "youth hangout portal" will highlight how to attract and retain young readers.

Speaking in Printing Summit Asia's session on "Optimizing Newspaper Production", Bicknell will talk about publishing systems for multimedia operations. During his session, the chief technology officer of HT Media will describe modern publishing systems, which should be capable of handling multimedia content and enable publishing on print, online and mobile platforms. The session will specify the requirements of a publishing system from publishers' perspective and how Hindustan Times went about selecting one.

In the "Futureproofing Production" session of Printing Summit Asia, Hazra's topic of discussion is Green Buildings. The technical director of the Times of India will present his case study on how besides being environment-friendly, the new generation of buildings using green technologies provide considerable savings in operating costs.

Balaji will speak at the CEO Conference's session on "Power of Printing". His topic, "Maximizing the print capability", will discuss how The Hindu uses heatset printing, trimming and stitching on the fly to create new products.

The event also had pre-conference workshops: Cost Control in Production, The Newsroom 3.0, Cross Media Advertising and iPad for Newspapers, Implementing.

The Cost Control in Production workshop discussed innovative ideas for cost-reduction in every sphere, which many publishing houses came up with during the recent crisis. The Newsroom 3.0 discussed the latest implementation of convergent newsrooms, which allow creation and processing of multi-media content for multiple platforms in an efficient manner. This workshop taught 'how to' with concrete examples.

Publish Asia 2010 has been organised by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and IFRA, the leading international associations for print and digital news publishing, which represent more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries.