Press at the Cercle de la Librairie on the Boulevard Saint– Germain in Paris. Mounier’s venture still touches people in the magazine
and by the mid-sixties became a biennial event. In 1969 it ventured outside Europe for the first time, when it was hosted in Williamsburg in the USA. FIPP increasingly became the association
that helped publishers gain knowledge and experience of global opportunities. And the World Magazine Congress became the networking venue, where contacts were made and relationships grew. The Congress also tackled major issues
of the day. “The Periodical Press as a Dynamic Force in the Communication Evolution”, was the unwieldy theme title of the 1965 event in Rome, for example. The 1975 Congress in Amsterdam looked at: “Publisher and Editor - Living Apart Together (The Open Marriage Between Creativity and Profit)”, while in Madrid in 1985 delegates debated “The Future of Periodicals in the Media Revolution”. At the 1971 event in London, C.R. Devine, vice-president of Reader’s Digest, mused, “The day may soon arrive when
When in Rome I
n 1925, the same year that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, French magazine publisher Hipólito Mounier, founder of journal L’Industrie Chimique (Chemical Industry), organised the 1st
International Congress of the Technical
media business today, for his event was the forerunner of what we know today as the FIPP World Magazine Congress. In its early years the congress toured Europe’s capitals,
The FIPP World Magazine Congress, which celebrates its 39th this year, has always moved with the times. Mike Nicks reports on how FIPP’s fl agship event has grown in stature and prominence over the years...
edition
magazine publishers will programme their editorial material on video cassettes and sell or rent them on a weekly or monthly basis.” The following day, French publisher Jean- Louis Servan-Schreiber complained that magazines were getting too much advertising! Meanwhile, Rein van Rooij, editor-in-chief of Televizier in the Netherlands, asked: “How to make money from the exploding technology of communications? That question should worry publishers of journals and magazines day and night.” Forty-two years on, some things haven’t changed. “I remember
at one time the theme of every conference was how some new development was seen as a threat or an opportunity,” says Helen Bland, FIPP’s company secretary and information services director. “But it was becoming tedious, and we realised that new developments are not a topic – they’re a constantly underlying theme. Conference themes in recent years have become much more embracing.” Helen has seen plenty of change in FIPP, especially in the way that publishers work together when they operate internationally. “A
company will often launch a foreign edition of one of their titles with an organisation who may be a competitor in some territories but that already operates in the new country, if the publisher of the title has no experience there,” she says. “That is the value of FIPP and the World Magazine Congress. We are not a lobbying organisation, we are about networking and knowledge.”
1925 Paris: First Congress 1953 Williamsburg: fi rst Congress in the USA 1965 Rome: the Congress establishes a biennial frequency 1971 London: fi rst Congress in the UK 1997 Tokyo: fi rst Congress in Asia 2001 Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: fi rst Congress in Latin America 2007 Beijing: fi rst Congress in China 2011 New Delhi: fi rst Congress in India