Google and Print Media to Square off at WAN Conference

The threats by Rupert Murdoch against Google and other Internet search indexes are not falling on deaf ears, at least on the news publishers' corner of this intense debate.

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is organizing its 62nd World Newspaper Congress under the theme, "What do we do about Google? The Great Debate."

The congress will take place in Hyderabad, India, Dec. 1-3 and will attract renowned publishers from throughout the world and also Google's Chief Legal Counsel David Drummond, the website's point person dealing with legal challenges in just about any country on the planet.

Here is WAN's complete announcement of its 62nd World Newspaper Congress:

Applaud our gains in web site traffic?  Develop closer partnerships with
Google and their competitors?  Launch our own search engines and collective
news portals?  Lobby to change or enforce copyright laws online?  Sue - or
encourage anti-trust cases?  What DO we do about Google?

The Great Debate at the 62nd World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India
(1-3 December next) will examine these and other such questions as news
publishers world-wide examine and discuss their options and strategies for
getting a bigger slice of the internet advertising revenues which are today
being massively reaped by Google.

David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Council of Google,
will be on stage to give the search giant's perspectives.  Gavin O'Reilly,
CEO of Independent News & Media and President of the World Association of
Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), and the participants will debate
with him. In the moderator's chair: Kees Spaan, Chairman of the Copyright
Working Party of the European Newspaper Publishers Association.

Mr Drummond leads Google's global teams for legal, government relations,
corporate development and new business development, including strategic
partnerships. Before joining Google in 2002, he served as its first outside
counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the
company and secure its initial round of financing.

Gavin O'Reilly was probably the first major news industry personality to
publicly criticise Google, when he called them 'kleptomaniacs' in a 2006
speech where he said they were "increasingly aiming their strategic efforts
at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper
publishers. The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because
of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their
expense".

Since then, others have joined in the chorus of opposition, most notably
Rupert Murdoch, who said last month: "The aggregators and plagiarists will
soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. If we do not take
advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the
content creators who will pay the ultimate price and the content
kleptomaniacs who triumph." Mr Murdoch just this week threatened to block
Google News from taking any content from News Corp web sites.

News Corp will be represented at the Congress by Les Hinton, Chief Executive
of Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, who will
speak about the company's multi-media strategies, including plans to shift
away from free content on the internet.

Full details of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress, 16th World Editors Forum
and Info Services Expo 2009, the global meetings of the world's press
organised by WAN-IFRA, can be found here.

There is still time to register! Special measures have been taken by Indian
authorities to facilitate  the processing of visas for Congress and Forum
participants and Hyderabad is linked by direct flights to major cities in
Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Other Congress and Forum speakers include:

- Andreas Wiele, Member of the Board /President BILD Division and Magazines,
Axel Springer AG, Germany;

- Olivier Fleurot, CEO, Public Relations, Corporate and Financial
Communications, Events Management for Publicis Groupe;

- Mahendra Mohan Gupta, Chairman/Managing Director and Managing Editor,
Jagran Prakashan Ltd, India;

- Ravi Dhariwal, CEO Publishing, Bennett, Coleman & Co. (Times Group),
India;

- John Paton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of impreMedia LLC, United
States;

- Martim Figueiredo, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, 'i' daily newspaper,
Portugal;

- Gerd Finkbeiner, Chairman of the Executive Board, manroland AG, Germany;

- Jaideep Bose, Editor-in-chief, Times of India;

- James Orr, Online News Editor, The Christian Science Monitor, USA;

- Paul Johnson, Deputy Editor-in-chief, The Guardian, UK;

- Steve Engelberg, Managing Editor, Propublica.org, USA;

- Harinder Baweja, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Tehelka, India;

- And many more!

The conferences will be opened by Pratibha Patil the President of India.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries
in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of
the world's newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000
publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120
countries.  The organisation was created by the merger of the World
Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation
for the news publishing industry.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs,
WAN-IFRA, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85
00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail:
larry.kilman@wan-ifra.org