Still time to register at international World Young Reader Conference

“Recent research tells us that parents and teachers, not friends, are the key to a young person adopting the habit of consuming newspaper content, whether on paper or on the latest devices,” said Aralynn McMane, director of young readership development at WAN-IFRA. ‘Making the right connections to these influencers isn't hard and can even be remunerative.”

Sessions and speakers include:

• How to create a social network, targeting mothers that also attracts new advertisers
  
• How a Dutch newspaper got its community to elect the ‘coolest' teacher in a contest that increased reader loyalty, presented by Huub Paulissen, chief editor of Dagblad De Limburger/Limburgs Dagblad
  
• How to persuade prominent local figures to support newspapers in education by ‘adopting' a class, presented by Elisabeth Jessen and Sabine Tesche, editors at Hamburger Abendblatt in Germany
  
• How newspapers in education coordinators have worked with teachers to keep young reader activities alive despite economic hard times
  
• How the supplement and online forum ‘Internet in the Family' attracted new sponsors and made an Argentine paper an ally to hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents by Roxana Morduchowicz, media education director at the Argentine Education Ministry
  
• Anna Homqvist, chief editor and Ylva Hvarfner, MD of Sweden's Familjeliv.com, which became an editorial and commercial success through marketing and partnerships with other newspapers in a concept that can be adopted in other markets
  
• Sandy Woodcock, director of the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, on how some US newspapers have found creative ways to monetise young reader activities involving parents and teachers, even in an economic downturn.
  
• Mark Astley, chief editor at Express & Echo in the United Kingdom, on the wide-ranging benefits of helping children take action to help save the environment. Express & Echo is a 2009 World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year.

Norske Skog, the Norway-based global paper producer, and the Czech Publishers Association, supports the conference; along with SMART Technologies and Czech distribution company PNS.

Full programme and registration information at www.wan-press.org/prague2009.