Press manufacturer manroland has signed up for another four years as strategic business partner of the World Association of Newspapers’ Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project. Involved with the project since 1999, the company says the “significant four-year investment” will support SFN’s role in identifying, analysing and publicising important strategic and operational breakthroughs and opportunities which can benefit newspapers all over the world. WAN chief executive Timothy Balding says manroland’s contribution goes far beyond financial support: “Their visionary outlook for the future of print, its creativity and constant innovation, are invaluable to the project and to newspapers everywhere,” he says. “As print newspaper sales continue to grow in dozens of nations across the world, it is essential to keep our focus on original solutions and strategies and manroland is very well placed to help us do that”. Manroland chairman Gerd Finkbeiner says manroland regards itself as a driving force in the SFN project: “Its results help to safeguard the competitiveness of the newspaper in the multimedia world and convincingly demonstrate to the public how important the newspaper is. “As a high-performance business partner to the printing industry, we see assisting print media to move forward as one of our main tasks”. The other SFN partners are Swiss-based advertising and PR group PubliGroupe, Norwegian telecommunications and media group Telenor, and newspaper systems supplier Atex . Through SFN, WAN produces an annual series of strategy reports on breakthroughs and developments in the newspaper industry, available exclusively to members. The Paris-based global organisation defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers worldwide. It representing 18,000 newspapers, and has 77 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries in its membership. Balding (centre) is pictured with manroland marketing and communications vice president Thomas Hauser and executive vice president for web press sales Peter Kuisle.