Attendance booms at interactive newspaper conference p.

By: Editorial Staff

TESTIFYING TO THE soaring newspaper industry interest in multimedia, attendance at an interactive newspaper conference this week more than doubled from the 1993 affair.
More than 600 people showed up in Tampa Bay, Fla., for "Newspapers '94: The Multimedia Mission" ? swelling conference rooms, filling halls and even overwhelming room service at the Hyatt Regency Downtown. The first day of the conference, Feb. 14, hotel management slipped under each guest's door a note apologizing for delays in delivering breakfast.
The attendance of more than 600 compares with 295 at the conference in San Francisco last year.
"Newspapers '94" was sponsored by Editor & Publisher and the Kelsey Group, a Princeton, N.J.-based tele-communications services research and consulting firm.
As remarkable as the boom in attendance was the diversity of the audience, which traveled to Florida from 26 countries. Indeed, about one-fourth of all attendees came from outside the United States, Kelsey Group president John Kelsey III said.
Some news organizations came out in force. The Cleveland Plain Dealer alone sent nine people, for example.
"Undoubtedly, this is the largest group ever assembled to discuss the interactive newspaper," Kelsey said.
E&P publisher Ferdinand Teubner compared the interest in interactive newspapering now to the trepidation publishers felt at the time radio emerged as a new popular medium.
He said publishers would do well to reflect on the advice famed editor and broadcaster H.V. Kaltenborn gave in a 1924 E&P article published in a similar atmosphere.
Kaltenborn, Teubner said, told newspaper executives, "Radio is doing big things in a big way. It is here to stay and to grow. To ignore it is to be blind to one of the great powers of the time. To oppose it is foolish . . . . "
"The attendance at this conference," he added, "is proof that newspapers have no intention of ignoring this latest threat to their business."