Starting in Norway, speaker and journalism academic Stephen Quinn explained VG.no's appointment of a social media monitor on their newsdesk. All journalists working on the site have their bylines linked to Twitter or Facebook accounts.
The paper's editor encourages journalists to spend around 20 per cent of their time on social media sites reacting and interacting with VG.no's audience there, said Quinn.
Fellow Norwegian newspaper group, A-Pressen places similar emphasis on social media, but homegrown social networks and community sites are at the heart of its strategy, said Are Stokstad, president and general director of the group.
"This year 3,000 of our print pages originated in social media," said Stokstad, referring to reverse publishing of reader comments and material used or developed from its network of community pages in one local title, Romerikes Blad.
Next year the group plans to increase this figure to 30,000 print pages and further reduce the costs of producing print pages in its papers - a rise facilitated by Origo, a social networking platform built specifically for the A-pressen group to which the paper belongs.
"We used to use Origo to strengthen online; now we use it strengthen print and online and to link the two," said Stokstad.
Every three days A-Pressen's Origo network will grow by 1,000 members and each will produce 20,000 images, texts and comments a year, generating around 700,000 page views, he said.
Asking the audience of editors gathered if they had social media editors working in their newsrooms, the show of hands was small.
But Martim Figueiredo, publisher and editor of seven-month-old Portuguese newspaper I Informacao, said the social media editor role, and encouraging the newsrooms journalists to work with social media, had been important from the paper's inception.
Another editor from Oman added that a new paper is soon to be launched in the country and will consider its social media presence from the very start; while a Brazilian editor added that 100,000 page views a month to his newspaper’s site are generated by Twitter.
Moving away from social media monitoring and newsgathering, Vietnamese news site VietNamNet has embraced social networks as a means of publishing news.
The site often publishes breaking news to Facebook before putting it on its own site, deputy editor-in-chief Pham Anh Tuam explained to Journalism.co.uk.
Raw news video footage in particular is posted to the VietNamNet page on the social networking site, before an edited version is published on the title's website. The site does this especially when it wants to get public opinion or reaction to a story, said Tuan.
While he believes there is some overlap between VietNamNet's Facebook audience and the audience for its website, publishing to Facebook gives the site access to a more interactive readership.
Additionally, the type of content that VietnNamNet can post to Facebook and the type of discussion that can take place there differs from what is possible on the title's main site. There are different responsibilities and freedoms to hosting such footage and debate on your own site, said Tuan.
The benefits of using social media as part of a newsroom's strategy and the capacity for news organisations to work with existing social networks and build their own was strongly advocated by a global range of delegates.
But it was the challenges not the opportunities of social media that received the most agreement from the gathered audience. "Google is no longer the problem," explained a Danish new media consultant in the audience.
"Social networks are the problem."
All #WANIndia2009 coverage from Journalism.co.uk at this link.
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