Directors of two of India's biggest publishing companies join a broad range of speakers addressing this year's Ifra World Publishing Expo and DCX Digital Content event in Berlin this October.

Rajiv Lochan, managing director and chief executive of The Hindu publisher Kasturi & Sons, and Sanat Hazra, who is technical and production director of the Times of India, are listed to speak at both the Digital Media World and Print World events, which last year ran consecutively.

Sanat Hazra's career includes time as production vice president of the New York Daily News as well as 14 years with the New York Times, and a role in material science at Crosfield Electronics, where he developed a direct imaging thermal plate.

Rajiv Lochan was previously a partner with McKinsey & Company and co-founded their Chennai practice.

Protagonists and practitioners of print publishing rub shoulders with doyens of digital, including the relative few who have made a success of digital print.

Among them is Iris Chyi, an associate professor at Texas University's school of journalism and author of 'Trial and Error: US Newspapers' Digital Struggles toward Inferiority'. Her 'Ramen noodles theory' suggests that online news, like ramen noodles, is an inferior good.

Three speakers come from German publishing giant Axel Springer, which famously sold it original Hamburg daily newspaper to partly fund its diversification into digital media. Among them is Axel Springer SE chairman and chief executive Mathias Döpfner, who is also the president of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers. A career which began in 1982 as a music critic of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, saw him become editor-in-chief of Hamburger Morgenpost in 1996, and of Die Welt a couple of years later. He joined the group board in July 2000.

Also from Axel Springer are Bild Group publishing director and head of its management board Donata Hopfen, and Bild Print managing director Frank Mahlberg.

Other speakers include DMG Media chief executive Kevin Beatty, Metro UK editor Ted Young, Calkins Media chief digital officer Guy Tasaka - who has spent the past four years at NewsStand/LibreDigital and Page Foundry creating digital publishing solutions - Schwäbisch Media managing director Kurt Sabathil, Local Media Association president Nancy Lane, GateHouse Media chief revenue officer Peter Newton, Druckzentrum Rhein Main managing director Michael Rettig, Hannes Ludwig - who is manager of FAZ's new business portfolio business unit, and Dan Easton, third-generation publisher of the Victoria Advocate.

Entrepreneur and publisher Ilkka Lavas is described as a "serial entrepreneur", best known for companies such as advertising network Improve Media and the TableOnline booking service, while Kitext co-founder Nicolai Erbs will talk about text classification automation and machine learning.

Two speakers with direct experience of digital newspaper printing are CSQ general manager Dario De Cian and Jean-Pierre de Kerraoul, president of French publishing innovator Sogemedia Group.

Italy's Centro Stampa Quotidiani - which De Cian joined from Müller Martini in 2000 - prints newspaper sections and other work on an HP inkjet system, while Sogemedia maintain's Kerraoul's ongoing focus on regional newspaper publishing with a series of titles produced on Kodak and manroland digital equipment.

Also contributing their specialist expertise are a number of WAN-Ifra staffers and the group's 2017 president, Michael Golden, who is vice chairman, of the New York Times Company. Among them is WAN-Ifra chief executive Vincent Peyrègne, who worked in the French minister of culture and communication's office - responsible for newspapers and new media as well as the "états généraux de la presse écrite," - before joining the group in 2008. He had also been head of development at Edipresse Publications in Lausanne.

Pictured: Rajiv Lochan, managing director and chief executive of The Hindu publisher Kasturi & Sons