Marta Okafor, editor-in-chief of the Northgate Chronicle, will open the Open Newsroom Summit on Thursday 12 November at 9:30 in the Tagus Hall.
Her keynote, "The newsroom after search", starts from a number her team could not ignore: in two years, the share of readers who arrived from a search results page fell by almost a third, while the share who arrived already knowing what they wanted to ask kept rising.
Okafor argues that this is not the end of the article but a change in its job. Readers still want reporting they can trust; they increasingly want it to answer them, in their words, on the page they are already reading.
What the talk covers
The first part of the keynote looks at reader behaviour across the Chronicle's sites: how long people stay, what they search for inside an article, and which questions they ask when a page offers to answer.
The second part is practical. Okafor will show how her newsroom decided which archives to open to an on-page assistant, which to keep out, and how editors review the questions readers ask so that the next story answers them before anyone has to.
The talk closes with a list of things she would do differently, including a frank account of a launch that went badly because nobody had told the night desk.
Practical details
The keynote lasts 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of questions. Doors open at 9:00 and the hall seats 1,200. Live captions in English and Portuguese are shown on the side screens, and a recording will be published on this site the following week.
Attendees with an accessibility pass can use the reserved seating at the front left of the hall; ask any volunteer in a green lanyard.