Paraphrasing Henry Kissinger, Owen says a leader is someone who takes people who would not have got there by themselves. "Leadership," he says, "is about what you do – it is not about your title." To become a leader, you do not need to wait until you become CEO of your company.

Owen says top leaders exhibit:

• Vision
• The ability to motivate others
• Decisiveness
• The ability to handle crises
• Honesty and integrity

(The first four can be learned, he says, but the last is innate and perhaps the most important, because people do not want to work with a leader whom they do not trust and does not deliver on his or her promises.)

Leaders at the middle management level exhibit:

• The ability to motivate others
• Decisiveness
• Industry experience
• Networking ability
• Delegation

Recent graduates/emerging leaders exhibit:

"Transformation implies for me a complete change – out with old, in with new. As leaders, I don't think it's an appropriate image to paint for our colleagues," he says.
 
"We see the current business as still capable of significant growth, with multimedia growing alongside the business and not replacing it," he says. "Many newspapers in Europe, and ours in the U.K., are actually doing quite well…the business remains full of life."
 
The constant focus on digital, digital, digital has to have a negative impact on newspaper staff, says Hustler, speaking at a Congress session on leadership. "Inevitably people are led to believe that what they do is unimportant and not valued," he says. "Our newspaper businesses are producing loads of cash. We have to give the right message to our colleagues and investors."
 

“Fifteen years into the Internet age and we are still publishing stories the way we published them a 100 years ago,” says Adair, “just pasting on the web.”

Broadcast is approaching the web in the same way, according to Adair. “Just putting them up in pixels. There's a tremendous lack of imagination on how we can take advantage of these new technologies.”

In August 2007, the St. Petersburg Times, Florida, USA, launched Politifact to combine traditional things and one semi-new platform to create something new: fact-checking as a new kind of story published online.

The project is a campaign tracker that tells readers whether statements and promises made by politicians are true or not. Each statement is assigned a “Truth-O-Meter” rating which ranges from “true,” to “false,” to “pants on fire.”

Both women, former frontline correspondents who informed the world about the recent political upheavals in the Arab world, recount their experiences to a gathering of World Editors Forum guests Saturday morning.

Shahira Amin is the first to take to the floor. She joined Nile TV, the Egyptian state-run channel, in 1989 and quit on 2 February this year, a day also known as “the battle of the camels.” Why abandon such a long and fruitful career that made her one of Egypt’s top television journalists? According to many western media organisations, it was because “she suddenly had a conscience." Amin dispels that myth.

Nile TV broadcasts in English, meaning there is a much higher freedom ceiling for the channel. Mubarak wanted to give a “semblance of democracy in free speech,” according to Amin. Thus, she declared, “I never changed my tone. I would say: ‘Well done Mrs Mubarak, you just opened a school for girls. Shame on you Mubarak for killing Sudanese refugees.”