Adapting to the challenges of the digital revolution
The news and media world is under assault as never before

Some of the most creative people of the media business met for two days, March 4th and 5th 2009, in Brussels, at the “Digital News Affairs” conference. The “DNA” is attented by Circom Regional General Secretary, Peter Sauer. His report after the first day starts with: “During this conference I always hear three phrases: “Budget cuts, social networks and merged newsrooms”.

New Ideas, new structures are needed to deal with the decreasing budgets in the whole media world. Everybody, who is reporting during DNA tells the audience, that we have to focus on are journalistic abilities, while using technological development to reduce the amount of money which has to be spent.

All experts during this conference say, that each media company should use each possible channel to deliver his journalistic content. This fits to the new Circom Regional strategy. During the annual conference the executive committee will propose to change the statutes of our organisation. It should be open not only for regional public television stations. It should be open also for the online and radio departements of our members.

One remarkable aspect of the DNA: The VJ award run by this conference was won by a newspaper VJ for the first time. The winner works for the Wasington Post. Her VJ piece makes clear, we as TV people don´t have the exclusive monopole to deliver top level quality for ever. We must take care of the new competition coming from the site of the newspapers in the web.

Finaly the DNA conference ensures me as the Secretary General of Circom Regional, that we are preparing an interesting annual conference in Groningen, which will deliver a lot of answers for the problems we all have to face.

The BBC is quite selfconfident. Pat Laughrey, head of BBC regions and nations,
answered the question what happens if lokal newspapers do not survive the economical crises.
He thinks the BBC could take over their job as well.

Michael Rosenblum's first visit in Europe was in occasion of the Circom Annual Conference in Kosice.
Many TV-Stations in Germany, HR in particular were influenced by his Circom-Workshops.

Creative heads at he panel

Audience