What keeps you awake at night? Well, if you are a newspaper editor, the answer is likely to be buzz words such as convergence, revenue, young people, subscription ... oh, and of course the little problem known as the future, writes Stephen Brook.
Media commentator Ray Snoddy get the opening session of the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow off to a flying start by positively bounces up onto the podium in front of a seemingly comatose audience and cheekily shaking them up with this opener.
"After years in the industry I am completely convinced of only one thing -- that all editors are meglomaniacs and those that aren't - just give them time!"
The media commentator says that impossible competitive pressure has put newspaper editors in the same position as the Mansfield Town football manager. "Whatever you do the lads will let you down and the best you can hope fall is a draw once in a while."
Snoddy then proposes a few modest suggestions about what should be done.
He calls for more investment not less particularly for journalists and training, because in the world of amateur blogs, "amateurs are in danger of taking over the asylum". Traditional media can combat this with their reputations for accuracy and credibility, but only if standards are maintained.
Snoddy the calls for an increase in subscription sales, which Britain long ago seemed to put into the too hard basket. But successful overseas newspapers such as the Lindberg newspaper in Holland has a 98% subscription rate. He's right. Witness the massive success of newspapers in Japan, which has similar subscription levels.
Newspapers must research and scour the world for best practice. "and learn from it, don't go quietly into the internet dark night" Snoddy urged.
Newspapers must embrace user generated content to the extent "Readers want to be involved and you ignore that at your peril." Snoddy praises the BBC's efforts in this area and points out it has seven people to check the authenticity of user generated content.
Next up is Ifra director and consultant Dr Dietmar Schantin. director of Newsplex. Ifra is international newspaper association headquartered in Germany. Schantin is director of its Newsplex unit, which deals with new strategies in the newsroom and advised the Telegraph newspapers on setting up its multimedia newsroom.
Schantin tells us what many already know: readers have changed - they want relevant content anytime and any place and they want to contribute content themselves.
But newspapers must integrate their print, mobile and online offering to serve their readers, or their audience, as they now are. Work flows must change and the same editorial department must service this outlets. For Schantin, ultimately, this will "enrich" newspapers - they will tell stories in a better way.
Liz Page, regional managing editor, Archant Life has a direct answer to what keeps editors awake at night? |It's people like her - the managing directors looking at the bottom line and demanding better margins.
Page is a traditionalist with the desires of readers governing her thinking - online is stealing the limelight but points to innovation in regions with part free newspapers and glossy local magazines such as Archant Life are increasing circulation.
She calls for a focus on core skills of journalism because that will distinguish the professionals from the amateurs in the future.
Roger Alton, editor of the Observer, since 1998 admits he is anxious about the future.
He heard the news about Saddam and watched the rugby on the weekend but still wanted to read about them in the paper today.
"What keeps me awake is the prospect of being called a tiresome and irritating old dinosaur," Alton grizzles.
He wants caution about the future, recalling visions of the future from his childhood in the 1950, where cities were transformed into sky high buildings, people lived in pods and got to work on monorails. It never happened and Alton wonders whether some of today's predictions about the future will go the same way.
"Nobody really knows, we have to be quite cautions about the future."
Alton says he is kept awake by convergence, the continuing demand for revenue, declining readership of young people.
He predicts falling circulation will plateau, although admits that "a lot of people disagree with me".
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