Wall Street Journal to host Digital Editors Network meeting

The Wall Street Journal will host an event organised by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), which will bring together journalism leaders to discuss new formats for news.

François Nel, Director of UCLan’s Journalism Leaders Programme, has organised the Digital Editors Network’s spring 2015 meeting, which will be hosted by John Crowley, The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Editor for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The meeting will look at new digital platforms for news and will also explore how innovative media organisations are grappling with and rethinking the news experiences they create there. Which new formats work best now? What are innovators planning for next?

Speakers at the meeting on the 17th floor of News Corporation’s UK headquarters at London Bridge will include the BBC World Service's mobile editor Trushar Barot on why his WhatsApp experiment convinced management to develop a formal instant-messaging news strategy; Tom Phillips on what new formats work for Buzzfeed and what ’type' of coders they are looking to hire to build them; why Edward Miller of Immersiv.ly believes that the end of Google Glass is just the start of virtual reality; and how Quartz engages audiences with data (and how you too can use their open-source tool Chartbuilder).

Participants will also get a preview of the Innovations in Newspapers: World Report 2015 due out the following week.

Discussions will be co-chaired by the DEN’s convenors François Nel, who is also a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and Nick Turner, Digital Strategy Manager at the CN Group. The event sponsors also include the editorial management software company Desk-Net.

Speakers at the spring meeting, which has been tagged as #formatDEN, are:

• Trushar Barot is Mobile Editor for the BBC World Service
• John Earner is the CEO and co-founder of Space Ape Games, a two-year old mobile gaming startup in central London
• Edward Miller is responsible for the visual content strategy for ‘Immersiv.ly’, a startup based around telling the news in virtual reality
• Juan Senor is a Partner at Innovation Media Consulting Group based in London and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University
• Tom Phillips is Editorial Director for Buzzfeed UK
• Cassie Werber is a London-based reporter for Qz.com
• Inga Thordar is a Senior Editor on BBC World News who worked on the steering group of the BBC’s Future of News project
• Blathaid Healy is the UK editor of Mashable.

The programme on Tuesday 9 June, will run from 2pm to 6pm at The News Building, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, with registration opening at 1.30pm and conversations afterwards spilling over into a networking reception that concludes at 7.30pm.

Registration is now open at: http://formatden.eventbrite.co.uk

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