The World Editors Forum has asked five prominent newspaper designers to pick their Top 10 newspaper designs and Top 5 newspaper website designs to illustrate the evolution of newspaper design and how it is beginning to relate more to the Web.

Here are the newspapers most often cited by the designers: The Guardian (United Kingdom), Poklitiken (Denmark), Bergens Tidende (Norway), St Petersburg Times (United States), Eleftheros Typos (Greece), De Morgen (Belgium), elEconomista (Spain), Excelsior (Mexico), Expreso (Portugal) and ripev (Estonia).

The newspaper websites most often cited were elpais.com (Spain), guardian.co.uk (United Kingdom), globeandmail.com (Canada), 24sata.hr (Croatia), and Times Online (United Kingdom).

The results are included in a chapter on the fusion of print and web design, one of the key trends examined in the just-released Trends in Newsroom 2008, the annual publication of innovative ideas for newspapers in the digital age from the World Editors Forum.

More on the report can be found at http://www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php

Over the past decade, newspaper designers everywhere have been emphasising more images, infographics and colour on print pages, says the report. Now, a trend is developing in which elements of newspapers print and online versions blend into one another.

The examples chosen by the designers are those they consider the best newspaper and online newspaper designs of 2006 and 2007. The five are Jrdas Guzman Bulha of Welt am Sonntag in Germany, Lucie Lacava, one of the most notable and prolific print designers working internationally, Robb

Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors and former visual editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, Peter Ong, an Australian-based designer with clients throughout Asia and the Pacific, and Ally Palmer, a founding director of Canada-based Palmer Watson, which has created internationally acclaimed designs for newspapers around the world.

Fusion design is just one of the developments covered in Trends in Newsrooms, which draws from the year-long discussions among editors on the Editors Weblog, http://www.editorsweblog.org

Other topics and cases include mobile journalism, user-generated content, video and other digital developments, integrated newsrooms, training and more. The report also includes the Newsroom Barometer survey, conducted by Zogby International for the WEF and Reuters, which examines the attitudes of editors towards the future of their craft.

Full details at http://www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php

The Paris-based World Editors Forum (http://www.worldeditorsforum.org ) is the organisation of the World Association of Newspapers that represents editors-in-chief and other senior news executives. WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its

membership includes 77 national newspaper associations, newspapers and newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 11 regional and world-wide press groups.