It’s not just the traditional three-day PANPA conference that’s for the chop this year … the organisation’s name is also set for the surgeon’s knife, writes Peter Coleman. Up for discussion at the annual meeting to be held at the end of the one-day ‘summit’ in Sydney on September 10 is a proposal – which has the support of the PANPA board – to change its name to the Newspaper Publishers’ Association. At that formal event – squeezed in the gap between the end of the conference programme and the Newspaper of the Year dinner drinks – members will be asked to vote on a motion which, the notice paper says, follows a detailed review by publishers of the roles of various industry associations. But the proposed ‘shortening’ is in fact, a lengthening, given that most people know the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association as PANPA … and many don’t even know what the acronym stands for (any more than they knew what Ifra stood for). Aussies like to shorten most things (where there’s no possibility to add a ‘-o’ or ‘-ey’ suffix) so will the organisation be vocalised as the ‘en-pa’ … or will people just go on calling it what they always did? For that matter, is the ‘NPA’ tag free of confusion with the 90-year-old UK national newspaper organisation of the same name, which agreed to co-locate with Britain’s regional Newspaper Society a couple of years back, and now shares a director? For many, ‘PANPA’ has simply been shorthand for the annual conference itself, but president Robert Whitehead, who explains the move on the organisation’s website, is right in his assertion that it could no longer rely on its main source of income coming from delegate registrations from a large annual conference. Nor, realistically, is it just about registrations, as exhibition and sponsorship revenue – traditionally sourced primarily from the ‘heavy metal’ end of the industry – has also been hard to find. Large conferences – and large organisations – have been under stress this year, with publishers cutting back on ‘discretionary’ expenditure. Even with its ‘free to members’ enticement, the PANPA ‘Newspapers: The future forum’ has been slow to win registrations, with major groups deciding that staff time may be too valuable to spare, even for a free event. It’s not alone in that respect, with America’s NAA struggling with Nexpo and mediaXchange, while Ifra – now merged back into its founding parent, the World Association of Newspapers – has been forced to cull or merge some events. Nor is it just about compelling content, although the boom years of the PANPA conference were certainly those when it helped drive newspapers’ flow-on from the desktop colour revolution, and Australia’s Single Width Users’ Group continues to flourish on predominately technical content. More likely – and this is a personal view – it’s purely about the impact of the global economic situation and indirectly the self-inflicted harm from which the US industry is suffering. Industry associations have certainly had to look for new revenue channels: PANPA has had the additional burden of recovering from years of instability and the succession of chief executives it has had since the days when Frank and Robin Kelett pretty much organised the group’s1000-strong annual events by themselves. There’s no doubt that the economic crisis will end, and the parlous state of the US industry will be resolved (although a few bankruptcies may be needed) but ‘newspaper publishing’ will probably never be the same again. Which begs the question: Is ‘newspaper publishing’ – with its association with dead trees – really the business we’re now in, and what we want to call it. The merged WAN-Ifra has opted to call itself the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers … which may be an alternative. But if you can’t do better than the globally-known ‘PANPA”, we’d vote for leaving it alone.