CONTEXT
The eighth annual News Xchange conference was held this year at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Valletta, Malta on October 15-16. Underwritten by Eurovision, the conference is the international news industry's must-attend event for candid, interactive and relevant discussion about the key issues facing the world's news media. This year's event was hosted by EBU member PBS Malta and, not surprisingly, focused on the key theme of survival.

NX'09 drew more than 350 delegates from over 50 countries, with more than a quarter of these delegates attending NX for the first time. The agenda for the two-day event addressed the key question of how to survive in the current economic recession, with revenue models under attack and with more and more viewers, readers and listeners switching away from traditional broadcast to the multitude of alternative platforms that the internet and mobile telephony provide. At the core of the discussion was the issue of how to make our voices heard in the burgeoning clamour of today's media market place.

THE AGENDA
This year's event featured seven distinct but related sessions, each addressing a different aspect of the survival question. The conference opened with “Warning! This Could Happen to You!” a hypothetical news situation involving potential terrorism, a plane load of passengers and the sometimes blurry line between a broadcaster's editorial philosophy and commercial imperative. With panelists from organizations including CNN International, NOS, Bloomberg Television, Television Malta, Reuters, SVT and the BBC, the ballroom was turned into an interactive news room, and delegates were asked to vote on a number of key decisions. These decisions included real-life issues such as whether to go with a story because it's showing up on Twitter and Facebook, whether to buy or use User Generated Content and whether to let an Advertising Director have a say on what runs and what doesn't run.

Other sessions included a look at Crowd-Sourced News - what it is and where it belongs in the reporting process; Political Reporting - how to do it without boring audiences to death; “Sex, Lives and Videotape” – what makes good storytelling in the news; how to do more with less; how to live the brand in news and news programmes; and a review of how and what the industry covered in the past year.

RESULT
At the end of the conference, News Xchange asked five contributors (David Brewer, Director, Media Ideas International; Bill Schroeder, Managing Director, The Schroeder Group; Bill Dunlop, President, Eurovision Americas; Frederic Filloux, Editor, mondaynote.com; and Gaven Morris, Head of Continuous News, ABC Australia) to gaze into the proverbial crystal ball. Each of these experts said they recognized the difficulty facing the industry: the need to strike the right balance between immediacy and accuracy, the need to continue to be relevant, the need to do more with less and possibly even less, the need to differentiate the news brand in ways that matter to and resonate for the audience. At the same time, however, there was a clear sense of (cautious) optimism. David Brewer said he believed this was an exciting time to be in media because it requires us to be smarter and more creative than ever before. Bill Dunlop pointed to developments with HD and noted that it's coming faster than we might think and we need to remember that within the lifetime of what we're buying today we're going to be asked to produce in HD.

“In underwriting the world's largest and most important conference for international news executives and journalists, Eurovision underscores our commitment to partnering with the industry and to fostering dialogue among and between players. Even in this difficult year, delegates flocked to Malta and, we believe, came away with a clearer sense of the challenges, yes, but a clearer sense of the opportunities, as well.”
— Peter Vickers, Head of Marketing, Eurovision Operations