Bertrand Pecquerie steps down as director of World Editors Forum

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Bertrand Pecquerie has stepped down as director of the World Editors Forum (WEF) after seven years in charge.

Pecquerie is the founder and former director of World Media Network, a press syndicate linking more than 20 major dailies around the world, including El Pais, Libération, and the Irish Times.

He was also previously director of the syndication and special events service at Libération and director of World Media Live, a Vivendi Universal subsidiary specialising in cultural websites.

Pecquerie told Journalism.co.uk that he was unable to confirm plans for a new role at this stage but said that there were three likely possibilities, one with a major French newspaper and two more "at an international level".

In a statement, Pecquerie said: "I loved this period of my life and I was very proud to launch new services for our community of editors (the Editors Weblog, the WEF webinars, the Newsroom Barometer...) as well as organizing our annual conference: we were 600 senior news executives at the 17th World Editors Forum held in Hamburg, Germany from 6 to 8 October 2010."

The World Editor's Forum is owned by the World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers (WAN-IFRA), which formed in 2009 after the World Association of Newspapers merged with the German publishing body, IFRA.

A spokesman for the WAN-IFRA said that the group wished Pecquerie well, and would start looking for a successor soon.

The group named Erik Bejerager as the new president of the WEF earlier this month.

WAN-IFRA will stage its 63rd World Newspaper Congress and 18th World Editors Forum this October in Vienna.

The group was forced to postpone last year's conference following financial difficulties, shifting it from the planned setting of Beirut, Lebanon to Hamburg, Germany in the process. The delay was the second in as many years after the

2009 conference in Hyderabad, India, was postponed from March to November because of the impact of the economic crisis on registrations for the event.