Disruption and transformation dominated the programme for the first day of WAN-Ifra’s Digital Media Asia event in Kuala Lumpur.

Traditional publishers told how they were coping with a real or anticipated crash in print revenue, online pure players explained the role social media had played in their success, and executives three of the world’s biggest search engines speculated about the “next big disruption”.

About 300 delegates are in town for the three-day event, which includes the Digital Media Awards presentations and a spontaneous competition to find the best advertising idea.

With a Mac laptop and an iPad up for grabs, delegates have been invited to share ideas at a specially-created website. Geoff Tan of Singapore Press Holdings says innovation is mandatory, and he has the support of systems vendor CCI – which is putting up the prizes – in urging delegates to get their thinking caps on. By way of inspiration was a video from Coca Cola, showing how an element from the famous logo had been turned into Danish national flags in a neat marketing twist.

Now there’s until Wednesday afternoon to post ideas on the appropriately-named www.adide.as website. (Overnight, 17 new ideas had been posted.)

Elsewhere, Warren Fernandez, editor of the Straits Times, told how Singapore Press Holdings is to “flip processes on their head” to turn its newsroom into a 24-hour operation.

The third-wave move – “the biggest I’ve seen” – is part of a response to changed market in which in which the print circulations are expected to fall and the flagship daily is no longer the dominant publisher in the island state: “We know the plunge is coming, so I would rather have the newsroom prepared,” he says.

After “breaking down silos”, an integration team was created this year in preparation for the transformation. “We’re reworking operations tp be able to generate all-day online content,” Fernandez says. Putting journalism first will remain a driving principle, “but we’ll work as one ST with one integrated newsroom.”

Studies had reinforced a decision taken in the 1990s not to give content away, and the publisher now bundles print and online with readers paying an extra SG$2 to add access to an iPad app. “We are also investing further in original content with extra bureaux at a time when others are pulling back,” he says.

The ST news team swung into action recently to cover the story when a double murderer fled to Malaysia, tracking the story as it developed through succeeding days: “Now the challenge is to do this sort of thing every day,” Fernandez says.

“We want videos that will go viral, interactive graphics and more online packages… and have developed several new products. We’ll fill up and own the space.”

Since the 1990s when Fernandez agreed (to a questioner) that there was “no economic alternative” to the 168-year-old Straits Times newspaper, dominance has disappeared and competitors are “all the great newspapers of the world, coming after our readers and advertisers”.

While readers are “ahead of the curve”, advertisers remain very conservative and still want print. “We’re stuck in the middle and have to make this change,” he says.

Bloggers play a key role in the new Times of Israel website, helping deliver “a marketplace of ideas”.

And Grig Davidovitz, who helped created the new business through his RGB Media consultancy, wants to know why other publishers aren’t doing the same. “There are no blog platforms like this among conventional publishers, and no aggregators,” he says.

Bloggers apply to join the site, where their content appears behind a paywall. Lists then filter contributions by popularity and ‘editor’s choice’ with top content often included in news sections. A separate CMS creates a security barrier from the main editorial operation.

“It works for the bloggers because they are part of an journalistic platform, and compete for the editor’s and crowd attention,” he says. “And it works for the site as a ‘journalistic long tail’.

“Each blogger is a marketing agent for the site, and about 20 blog posts a day generate ten per cent of the site traffic. “We have 1500 bloggers with 100 joining every month.”

The ad-funded initiative has helped the new site to a commanding position, in which it is chasing established players the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz.

Counting newspapers’ online as well as print audiences – as Australia’s new Emma metric does – has transformed ideas for publishers, editor-in-chief of The Age Andrew Holden says. “Online makes (Fairfax Media stablemate) the Sydney Morning Herald the ‘big guy’ in the market and we’re chasing hard in Melbourne.

“And one digital subscriber has about the same value as a print subscriber, given that there are no distribution costs.”

Those distribution costs were also front-of-mind in a decision to cut unprofitable circulation – such as a scheme under which tertiary students used to get The Age home-delivered for $40 a year, costing the publisher $300 for each subscription. But he admits such initiatives have helped make print in Australia, “a bit of a bloodbath”.

Introduction of a paywall – readers are allowed to access 30 stories a month, but the word itself is banned – on the websites of the two metro dailies had seen “no significant drop off” in circulation, and helped compensate for print losses.

And the revenue: Holden says he’s not allowed to quote figures, “but with 64,000 subscriptions and the cheapest at $15, you can do the math: The Sydney Morning Herald is doing about $1 million a month and The Age (60,000 subscriptions) not far behind.”

This is not, he says, “a silver bullet… but it’s some revenue alongside others from print”. Among diversification plans is one to quadruple revenue from events to $100 million a year.

With advertising revenue “already gone” – newspaper publishers are “unable to compete for eyeballs” – print circulation revenues set to crash, and in his opinion events income “not scaleable”, Sachin Gopalan presented an urgent case for business transformation.

The grim assessment, from the chief executive of Indonesia’s Beritasatu Media Holdings, publisher of the Jakarta Globe, was that giving away content free had changed the media habits of readers and seen “everyone make money except us.

“We’re all working for Google,” he says.

Beritasatu’s solution has been to build a premium website – free to subscribers of its English-language print edition – and heap it with extra content, freebies and privileges. He urged delegates to look at ways of learning from print in their online efforts, “find a way to bridge the gap, and grow.

“Only good journalism can save the day,” he says.

Ideas also came from online pure players, with speakers including Kien Lee, founder of luxury and lifestyle website senatus.net, and Byron Perry the American founder of city web publisher Coconuts Media.

Senatus had leveraged social media, developing a portfolio of Facebook pages and a “modest” YouTube channel followed by 700,000 viewers. But Lee says, “I’m not sure about using too many social media sites”.

“The ways people consume media have changed: People curate what they like and expect it to be pushed to them,” he says.

Perry told how the success of quirky and humorous content had underpinned the growth of leading sites in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore and Manila. “We cover everything from the opening of a cupcake shop to a murder,” he says.

He urged the use of provocative images, headlines with a “curiosity gap” and great stories, but admitted that – with no marketing budget – social media exposure as a result of their Bangkok flood coverage helped get the business started.

Finally, two slightly incredible spectacles closed the afternoon proceedings: Digital Media Asia invited to tea, the people who “ate the newspaper industry’s lunch” and concluded with a profile of how car maker Nissan – in partnership with Thomson Reuters – had set up a broadcast studio and full-scale newsroom to prepare corporate content for distribution mostly through non-traditional channels.

Alan Soon (Yahoo!), Todd Forest (Microsoft Online Media & Publishing) and Parin Mehta (Google) – with Wall Street Journal Asia digital editor Adam Najberg – were billed to discuss ‘the next big disruption’ but delivered instead their views on wide-ranging topics including user-generated content and “the meaning of journalism”, and the role of search engines as news publishers.

Was the role adversorial or complementary; would they share the potential $1 million cost of defending investigative journalism in court; did the likes of Yahoo! see themselves as a news website, delegates wanted to know… and it’s not clear whether the answers – vaguely around the theme of “I would love to see it – placated questioners.

Joachim Schmaltz (Reuters) and former colleague Dan Sloan (Nissan) detailed the “market map” that had seen Nissan produce 1500 videos in two-and-a-half years. From what journalists regard as ‘the dark side’, Sloan told traditional publishers they could contribute by providing content, distribution channels and local knowledge.

And Andrew Holden, who asked the $1 million question, observed that it, “showed how horizons were widening for journalism schools”.

Peter Coleman

On our homepage: Straits Times editor Warren Fernandez

Above: ‘Disruption’ panelists (from left) Mehta, Forest, Soon and Najberg