DUBLIN, Ireland — The World Association of Newspapers is unique in researching the trends and identifying the opportunities facing newspapers around the globe.

To that end, the group’s recent 2003 conference featured a wide-ranging group of executives charged with crafting their companies’ strategies.

Their strategies differed in many respects, but common threads emerged. Among the most prevalent:

Newspapers must improve their operating efficiencies even as they operate their core businesses.

Newspapers must make it easy for companies to do business with them and develop new revenue streams that complement their operations.

Newspapers must continue to harness the power of the Internet and seek to innovate their operations through technology.

“We are not the same company we were a year ago and we won’t be the same company a year from today,” said William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews Group.

“You have to be ready to change your business and your company to keep up with the happenings in the world. Newspapers will be strengthened when they can leverage their brand across multiple platforms.”

To that end, Singleton, who supported strongly the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal cross-ownership rules (see below), said he’s ready to purchase television stations that can be marketed in concert with dailies he owns in selected markets. His first likely purchase: KTVF-TV, an NBC affiliate in Fairbanks, Alaska, where MediaNews already publishes The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Janet L. Robinson, senior vice president of operations at The New York Times Co., said one of her company’s chief priorities is to “globalize” its products, particularly at its flagship New York Times.

Robinson said NYT execs have set a 10-year goal to expand coverage nationally and internationally across all media platforms.

The newspaper’s influence already has expanded well beyond its Big Apple boundaries, with half of its more than 1 million daily readers living outside the New York metropolitan area. The paper is available for home delivery in 250 markets nationwide, up from 62 just five years ago.

In addition to accelerating print distribution, Robinson said NYT’s Web traffic is drawing a growing amount of international traffic. Almost 20 percent of viewers accessing NYTimes.com live outside the United States, she said.

The site’s visitors have translated into more than 162,000 subscriptions to The Times’ printed edition within the past two years.

The Globe and Mail in Toronto, meanwhile, didn’t fare quite as well in its bid to meld its print and electronic products.

“In Canada, convergence has become a dirty word,” said Phil Crawley, publisher and chief executive officer. Only three years ago it was the Holy Grail for North American media companies, he said.

Crawley said, for example, that Canadian consumers were cool to the idea of paying for “inferior-quality” video highlights from newspapers’ Web sites when they could obtain much higher quality coverage from their television screens.

“Conceptually, I still believe convergence is going to come about,” Crawley said, adding that The Globe and Mail’s Web operations will become profitable this year. “But the market is not there yet, perhaps not for 10 years.”

Other speakers at the WAN conference included Lord Conrad Black, chairman of Hollinger International and Susan Clark-Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of Phoenix Newspapers Inc. in Arizona.