Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press, Welcome.

Welcome to Copenhagen, Welcome to NewsXchange, Welcome to Denmark - a country, where green energy provides domestic heat and electricity, where bicycles outnumber cars, where the water is so clean that you can swim in the canals of Copenhagen, where people trust the institutions, and where transparency rules.

All of these positive denominators are probably some of the reasons why the Danish population according to UN’s World Happiness Report is the happiest nation in the world.

However, I am not sure the UN researchers conducted their survey on a too dark, too cold and too short day in November…

A gloomy winter period is not our only challenge, but our society is based on compromises and finding common ground, even on difficult matters. Make no mistake, this does not mean that the debates in a Danish context are dull and idle…but we always seem to find, if not the best, then a workable solution. That is the DNA of our democratic society.

Over the next few days you take on the challenges of your business – the news. News shapes reality, and we need media to filter the world in a trustworthy way. This has always been important, but never as important as it is today.

More than ever there seems to be a gap between reality and the perception of reality. It’s a paradox – we live in an age with endless reliable and accessible data on almost anything, at the same time the amount of stories available, be it on facebook, twitter or other social media that resonate factually false data, are substantial.

People are generally moving away from conventional news media. Especially young people do not read newspapers, do not watch television, do not listen to radio – and they most likely never will. They get their news from social media, from Facebook, from YouTube, and so on.

Most of the contents on these platforms are not sorted along the lines of professional journalism.

Are you met by fact or fiction, or maybe an elaborate combination of the two – who knows?

This is a huge issue for our democracy, to quote the late American communications theorist James Carey: “There is no democracy without journalism, and there is no journalism without democracy”.  

So what to do? In these troubling times of fast changing news habits and crippled financial models in the media industry, the public is waiting for you to find a new way to serve it. 

That you use the new opportunities of digitalization to tell meaningful and trustworthy stories to us – stories about our common challenges and the opportunities, we share – stories that find their way to the next generation as well.

I urge you to insist on serving your audience the truth or at least, as some issues are highly complex, the best obtainable version of the truth; the good as well as the bad; the problems as well as the inspirational solutions - to see the world with both eyes. That’s important.

It’s not an easy task, by all means, but the world relies on you to tell great and truthful news. I wish you all an inspiring, meaningful and constructive conference.

Thank you.