That's one of the major themes that emerged from the 18th World Newspaper Advertising Conference, held in Budapest late last week. "The book of marketing has been rewritten," said Marcus Wilding, Vice President of Carat Global Management, a keynote speaker at the conference.

The sheer number of media choices and formats is changing the way both editorial content and advertising are consumed. "It's all about consumer decisions," said Mr Wilding. "What we're doing is, we're moving away from, 'here is a space, we want to buy it,' to 'here is a story, what can we do together to amplify it.'"

That new forms and new techniques are developing was evident in the cases presented at the conference, organised by the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers. It was also clear from the vast array of strategies on display that newspaper companies have become truly multi-media businesses that are able to resist the fragmentation that is transforming both the media and the advertising industries.

From search to events marketing, to new audience measurement techniques, to the day-to-day issues such as training advertising staff for multi-media sales, newspapers have responded to the changing marketplace in many innovative ways.

Take, for example, the movement toward replacing newspaper circulation with an integrated print/online audience measurement to better reflect the reach of newspapers, no matter what the platform.

"Despite newspapers delivering content on many platforms, we're still being measured in the same old way, by only one of our methods of distribution, and it is misleading," said Andre McGarrigle, Director of Research and Customer Insight for the Guardian, which has developed "Total Audience UK" to measure print and online reach.

Chris Boyd, President of the International Audit Bureau of Circulation, described the work of the Media Measurement Integration Task Force, a WAN initiative that brings together media organisations in a global coalition to encourage integrated audience metrics. And Tamas Perjes, Deputy Media Research Director for IPSOS in Hungary, talked about taking it a step further – measuring the impact of "word of mouth" and engagement to reflect the influence newspaper readers have with their contemporaries.

The full conference report can be found here.