What a brill day!

I have learnt so much about marketing and, once again, had the chance to speak to some very intelligent people about the future of journalism. Many of those people are still downstairs in the Holiday Inn bar, so I will only be giving a quick summary and then will be down to join them!

The start of the day was going over some of the basics of marketing theory, which interestingly concluded that if our readers don’t trust us as a brand then we have no product. This, of course, rang true with me as I have been banging on about the trust lark for some time.

The afternoon was a talk to our group from Karen Swan, marketing head for Trinity Mirror Regionals. She introduced us to a whole host of interesting tools that can be used to gather stats about our audience – both online and in print. It has certainly convinced me I need to talk to our marketing department more.

Then we had the Journalism Leaders Forum with a panel that included Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. He was interesting but the other panellists that spoke after him… well I’ll leave it for you to decide as I streamed the whole thing on Bambuser.

I get annoyed when people suggest that the only people who can deliver news to the public are newspaper journalists. I believe that is an arrogance based upon fear.

So cross was I, I tweeted a link to a quote taken from the chair of the US southern newspapers association in 1933 on the rise of radio:

The newspapers of the country, through their own trained representatives and through the respective news organizations are the only ones equipped to do an honest and accurate job of news reporting.

This was then quoted to the panel by Markmedia who, it appears, was even more disgruntled with the discussion than I was!