• Editor & Publisher, Monday, March 26, 2007 11:15 AM

About 400 publishers, editors, journalists and experts from 74 countries are meeting in Washington, D.C., to tackle the global problem of getting younger people to read newspapers. The World Young Reader Conference, the seventh put on by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), includes large U.S. concerns.

"What they're going to be looking at is sharing information about what works in different places," says Jim Abbott, vice president of the NAA Foundation. The conference is apt to underline how far ahead newspapers in Europe and Latin America are of their U.S. counterparts when it comes to attracting young readers. As one example in France, Play Bac Presse publishes dailies aimed at age segments starting with 5- to 6-year-olds up to teenagers 14 and over. The four papers have a combined circulation of about 200,000. Very young readers are also targeted with daily print papers in Bolivia, Mexico, Panama, and Ecuador.

"U.S. papers haven't really caught up yet," Abbott says. "For a long time we've believed, as far as NIE (Newspaper In Education), that we were the largest and the best." But while American NIE programs are still the largest in getting papers into classrooms, publishers have not been nearly as aggressive or innovative as other nations.

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