Maani Safa, the Head of Mobile for the Telegraph Media Group in the United Kingdom, has joined the programme for Beyond 2009, the World Digital Publishing Conference to be held on 5 and 6 November next in Barcelona, Spain.

Driven by increasing consumer demand, the Telegraph is pursuing a strategy to make mobile news and mobile journalism a natural extension of its website and its reporting. It recently relaunched its mobile news site and has been developing new mobile applications, including applications for the Google Android. Mr Safa will discuss these developments, as well as the Telegraph’s overall mobile news strategies.

This year’s Beyond the Printed Word, the annual digital publishing conference of the World Association of Newspapers and News Pubishers (WAN-IFRA), is dedicated to consumer-driven digital publishing advances. Sessions will focus on research to improve usability and to measure success and loyalty: on innovation in mobile services and other platforms; and on search, social networks, local content, and paid-for models.

Digital publishers and other senior executives from 16 countries are already registered for the events, to be held at the Pullmann Barcelona Skipper Hotel on the city’s Mediterranean waterfront. Full details of the conference can be found at www.ifra.com/beyond.

Confirmed speakers include:

  Inma Martinez, President of Stradbroke Advisors in the United Kingdom, who is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists. She works closely with entrepreneurs, venture capital firms and multinational corporations around the world to fund innovation in emerging sectors and to launch new digital products and services.

  Wolfgang Blau, Editor in Chief of Zeit Online, the online edition of Germany’s largest weekly newspaper. Mr Blau is well known for his early involvement in journalistic online projects, including the development of the German audio download portal Audible.de, which now belongs to Amazon.

  Sara Öhrvall, Head of Research and Development for the Bonnier Group in Sweden. Ms Öhrvall is an expert collecting and using consumer data to develop a “future media map” to exploit usage trends. She is also chairman of the debate site Newsmill, Fever blog site, job portal Workey and director of Dagens Industri and TV4.

  Gumersindo Lafuente, director of soitu.es, which combines the best of traditional journalism with the opportunities that the internet brings for both journalists and news consumers. Soitu is one of the most innovative online-only publications in the Spanish-speaking market, known for its innovative use of widgets, the software tools than anybody can embed in their own websites.

  A speaker, soon to be announced, from 24sara.hr, the unique Croatian news site that has no scrolling. It fits the size of the computer screen, one screen only in any resolution. This makes 24sata simple, usable and intuitive. Since the concept was launched in September 2007, unique users increased from 30,000 to 200,000 per day with a jump in page views from 800,000 to an incredible 3.1 million per day.

  Philippe Jannet, CEO of Le Monde Interactif, the website of the prestigious French daily. Mr Jannet has long been a key figure in the development of digital publishing in France, where he has been President of the Online Publishers Group since 2000.

  Reiner Mittelbach, co-CEO of WAN-IFRA, who is shaping the new organisation to play a leading role in the multimedia age. WAN-IFRA was created in July 2009 by the merger of IFRA with the World Association of Newspapers; Mr Mittelbach had been CEO of IFRA, the global research and service organisation for the publishing industry, since 2001.

  Anders Stenbäck, Manager for Business Development at Helsingin Sanomat in Finland. Mr Stenbäck joined the Sanoma Group in 2003 and has worked in print, classified, online, mobile and online classified product and business development. He has a background with Nokia and acts as an advisor and board member of numerous online startup companies in Finland.

  Plus more speakers to be announced. For the evolving programme, and registration information, consult www.ifra.com/beyond.

The conference wll be chaired by Mariam Mammen Mathew, Chief Operating Officer of Manorama Online in India, and Ramón Salaverría, Chair of the Journalistic Projects Department and Multimedia Communication Laboratory (MMLab) at the University of Navarra in Spain.

All presentations will be translated into English, German, French and Spanish. Other languages will be offered for groups of 10 or more.

Exhibitors in the conference’s Solution Park include Arena Interactive, Escenic and Nstein. Sponsors of the conference include EidosMedia, protecmedia and Thinkindot (Dos al Cubo). More on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities can be found on the conference website.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.

Inquiries to:

Larry Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, WAN-IFRA, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: larry.kilman@wan-ifra.org.

Christiane Schmidt, Senior Programme Manager, WAN-IFRA, Washingtonplatz 1, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany. Tel.: +49 6151 733-771. Fax: +49 6151 733-960. Mobile: +49 172 9 88 24 44. E-Mail: christiane.schmidt@wan-ifra.org.