Digital News South Africa

Second Managing Sports News Conference draws close

The second annual WAN-IFRA conference on Managing Sports News will be held in Paris from 3-4 February 2011. Matt Kelly, publisher at Mirror Group Digital in the UK, will make the presentation on ten innovations in the world of digital sports news, and will chair the conference.
Second Managing Sports News Conference draws close

The two-day event aims to provide publishers, sports editors and other news executives with successful initiatives to develop local sports news editorially, as a business, and on all platforms.

The conference also features Paulo Henrique Ferreira, digital media executive manager for Lance! Group in Brazil, who will explain how the sports daily Lance! grew in a competitive market to become a leading sports media group.

Sales and audience success

Ferreira will examine how Lance! achieves its sales and audience success in a market saturated with television, internet and countless sources of sports news. He will also discuss how Lance! is preparing for the two global events scheduled to take place in Brazil in the near future: the Football World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympic Games in 2016.

Thibaut Potdevin, business development manager at UEFA, will examine how publishers can cooperate with the organisers of major sports events and understand the sponsors. He will be joined by Larry Kilman, executive director of communications and public affairs for WAN-IFRA and a member of the FIFA Media Committee, who will examine how new media is challenging the traditional relationship between sports and media, and posing new issues for open news coverage of events.

Other topics include:


  • How news media can take advantage of their special qualities and make use of their unique local information.
  • Using technologies, new web and mobile initiatives to best advantage.
  • Working with visual journalism to grab the attention of readers.
  • Benefitting from brands to attract advertisers and partners.
  • Fantasy Games and online games, drivers of growth for publishers.

The conference programme and registration details can be found at www.wan-ifra.org/sportnews.

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