It seems there is still a simple two-word answer: More training.

Sure, responses were all over the map (the full list is posted below the jump) and I’ll get to some of those in a moment. But, the most common request at root is for more help understanding our new media environment.

Some of the independent, hyperlocal startups (dare I call them bloggers?) in the audience said they could use help with everything from basic research and editing practices to selling and analyzing ads to understanding business finance. They also want to build a stronger indy-web community that, at a minimum, would be a forum to share best and worst practices.

The churched journalists in the room asked for some of the same instruction: editing for the web, learning the basics of graphics, and web literacy (tweeting, texting and blogging). But, like the indy’s, the guys inside established media organizations need help with the business side (see Jeff’s post on getting “theah from heah”).

Folks want to see programs for bringing business students into media management (much as we tried to do last summer). A few more suggestions:
- Future conferences organized around specific revenue opportunities – some people also want to have a conference organized around verticals and niche sites.
- Research into what kinds of advertising small businesses need.
- Strategies for making that advertising more valuable.
- Looking at what impact greater bandwidth and mobile devices will have on journalism and advertising.

One veteran journalist told me someone should create a not-for-profit, possibly based in a university, that offers free business consulting services to journalism startups. He said the consultancy could cultivate a thousand test cases for our business models – a much better approach, he says, than getting funding for a lab to test them out in one area (which was another suggestion from the panel).

Finally, here are two of my favorites: training for small communities that have lost their papers and a conference aimed at media in Africa and other parts of the world. It is important to keep these areas, so often left out of the conversation, in our minds.

As I said, there are a lot more topics below the fold. We’ll be doing more work on some or most of these suggestions in the coming weeks and months. Do you have more? Send them along!

New Business Models for News Next Steps:

How do we get a cooperative relationship? Or not?

More help from the Schools for “Bloggers”–
- Equipment
- Training
o How to sell
o Style, editorial, quality
o Research
o Video
o Trending
o Analytics
o Biz Finance
o Marketing
o Mistakes /best and worst practices
o Relationships

Training / Education for the Pros in the newsroom:
Content programming
Networking – building the network
Simple graphics, basics
Editing for the web
Web literacy – sms, tweeting, blogging, etc.

Transparency – read more watchdogs from the community
- Press government to make data available in a usable format

Map out a route for an existing newspaper to reinvent itself into the New News Organization – with specific steps

Get business school students to learn media management

Partnerships in technology, databases

Big media guys need quality/reliability scores for bloggers

Way to spread listservs

Making clickthrus more trackable, making ads more valuable for the advertisers

APIs, APIs, APIs

Making comments rateable

Assignment desk
Better aggregation tools

Advertising (how to make it more valuable for the local advertiser):
- Offering a suite of services to local businesses (consulting, optimization)
- Standardization
- For schools or others: more research on what local businesses need

Selling Data –

A way to maintain newsinnovation momentum throughout the year

Hack-a-thon – developers and journos collaborate to see what results.

Community building among sites – a Blogger meetup?

Targeted conferences around specific revenue categories – B2B, etc.

Success stories

More on social media

A lab to test the assumption in the newsinnovation model

Access to capital – a meet up of investors and journos.

More on web metrics, and what happens as we shift to mobile and streams from web pages

Mentoring program – for communities that have lost heir papers

Best practices / less tech more content

Impact of improved bandwidth and improved smartphones

Conference on media in Africa & other parts of the world

UPDATE: For those of you who are wondering, here is a link to the models that are being discussed this morning.

And, here’s the livestream for your viewing pleasure:

By his lights, a not-for-profit like the one we envision (not unlike the real-life MinnPost), could reasonably generate more than $700,000 in membership revenues by year three, compared to the $547,000 we had estimated. Barnett, a journalist who is studying not-for-profit management at The George Washington University, was kind enough to plug his own assumptions into our model. His revision is available as an Excel download here.

Barnett started with a slightly higher number of member-donors in year one, taking the number of MinnPost members in its first 14 months and translating that to cover just 12 months. His calculations include some members not included in MinnPosts’s annual report (which was our source), arriving at a first year membership estimate of $298,000, roughly $25,000 more than our model.

But the real differences start to show up in years two and three as the news organization matures and puts roots deep into the community. Barnett estimates that by year three the not-for-profit should aim for a five-fold increase in the total number of members, to 4,157 from 762.

Barnett, who is studying not-for-profit management at George Washington University, says his assumptions draw on studies of membership efforts at mature not-for-profits. Typically, a robust membership drive will result in a pyramid where the majority of donors are at the lower contribution levels. Rather than extrapolating membership based on a conversion of estimated unique visitors (as in our model), Barnett has drawn a picture of what a healthy membership pyramid for a metropolitan news organization should look like in three years. Even with his more robust assumptions, however, Barnett’s organization still converts just one percent of estimated unique visitors. Indeed, the lowest rung accounts for much of the growth in Barnett’s model while membership at higher levels grows more slowly and actually decreases in the highest.

While there isn’t a defined statistical correlation between the top and bottom of the pyramid, Barnett says there is a relationship.

“It’s a social process, people see what leaders in the community and their peers are giving and say they want to be a part of that,” Barnett says. “People start small and work their way up. Not every body will move up the ladder, not everybody who moves up will go to the top, but the end game as a not-for-profit is to make this a part of people’s lives. When there’s a socialization to it, that’s when you start getting the reinforcing numbers at the lower end.”

More and more journalists, casting about for ways to preserve their livelihood, have been drawn to the not-for-profit model. The Voice of San Diego announced last week that it will provide advice and support to an offshoot in nearby Orange County and Spot.Us has launched a franchise in Los Angeles. But, as Barnett makes clear in a post on ProPublica’s effort to start finding alternatives to foundation grants, launching a not-for-profit cannot be a “tin-cup substitute” for journalists who balk at running a business.

“A lot of these organizations get the grant money but then struggle to make it on their own, he says. “That’s what this is about, how to go from being hatched to going out in the wild to survive.”

Want to add your own assumptions to our models? Go right ahead! And, please, shoot them back to us. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

Dougherty explains the move:

We’ve concluded that, as a nonprofit, we cannot raise the money we need to build a truly robust local news organization that provides comprehensive local coverage.

The Daily News needs $1 million to $2 million per year to do a great job of covering a city as sprawling and complex as Chicago. And despite hundreds of phone calls and letters to foundations, corporations and individual donors over the past four years, we’ve never come close to that.

Last year, we raised about $300,000. This year, due to the economic downturn, it was unclear whether we would be able to maintain that level of revenue, let alone move quickly to expand our coverage.

Jim Barnett, former Washington correspondent at The Oregonian who is now studying not-for-profit journalism models at George Washington University, thinks other news start-ups may follow the Chi-Town Daily News example and use not-for-profit status to prove an editorial concept before launching a for-profit venture.

“I do think more will follow this path, but not this quickly, and, I think, out of strength rather than necessity,” says Barnett, who blogs his research here and at the Nieman Journalism Lab. “I think other nonprofits with ambitious revenue goals will consider hybrid strategies — perhaps launching for-profit operations that help supplement their resources, much as Minnesota Public Radio did before spinning them off. But the strength of the nonprofit model would remain — that is, it puts the needs of the newsroom ahead of the investor.”

The New News Organization plays an important role here as an outlet for experienced, professional journalists to train local bloggers and citizen journalists how to cover their communities with more depth, detail and accuracy. That training would then help the NNO expand its daily coverage of education, local politics, crime, business, sports, entertainment and nightlife. (See our post from yesterday on the staffing breakdown for the NNO.)

Mike Reicher, a CUNY J-School grad student, wrote about his experience at The Local this summer recruiting experienced journalists to train budding community reporters and photographers.

Also, in our interviews with several not-for-profit news sites, we found experienced investigative journalists like Trent Seibert of Texas Watchdog training everyday people around the country how to properly cover their communities. Doing so has allowed Trent and his colleagues to raise more money for their investigative news site, which will play a vital role in the future of journalism.

And as local coverage grows, there will also be opportunities for professional training in citizen sales. In the larger framework, business-to-business services like a white label email and online marketing training service — or even in-person training sessions — could provide viable revenue opportunities for a new news organization. Those services also represents the kind of broader community outreach people like Steve Buttry have been calling for in various places and in response to some of our models. As a result, citizen sales training could help independent local bloggers grow their ad revenues without the need to hire a full-time sales person.

He asks whether our model for the growth of advertising revenues–to 49% of all revenues by year three from 18% in year one–is possible or desirable at a lean not-for-profit new organization. First, to determine whether such growth is possible we looked to Joel Kramer, CEO at MinnPost.com. Kramer told David Westphal in a piece at OJR in October that he hopes 70% of MinnPost’s revenues will come from advertising by 2011.

Here’s the paragraph from the OJR piece:

Q. What was your hope, what is your hope on the mix of advertising and contributed revenue?

A. When we started we said our hope was, by 2011, 70 percent advertising, 30 percent membership. Right now it’s running about 50-50, maybe a little higher on the membership side. It’s pure guesswork because it’s a new model. The key is to get to a sustainable model by 2011. There are a lot of reasons to become optimistic, but the advertising side really needs to get better.

Kramer has since been hard at work developing display ad business (MinnPost was charging a $15 cpm earlier this summer) and new advertising units, including a Twitter-like service that he thinks could be a new form of classifieds for local news.

Our model only has 49% of revenues coming from advertising in the third year. Still, it’s a fair point to wonder whether not-for-profits should join the scramble for advertising and sponsorships when for-profits are having such a hard time of it themselves. Kramer himself comments on Barnett’s post to say our model appears to overestimate potential advertising and underestimate membership revenues. He also does a good job of answering Barnett on the pressures such a lean organization faces in separating business from editorial.

Again, we’d love to play that scenario out in our Google doc to see if those differences amount to a wash. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

This project is all about interactivity and we wouldn’t have moved past the theoretical phase without your input. That goes for our 113 survey participants and the 13 sites we profiled as well.

Keep the comments coming and give your own figures a shot using one of our spreadsheets. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

We settled on a $12 cpm as a conservative benchmark, based on feedback from a number of news organizations, large and small. Indeed, we commonly heard a range of $15 to $20 cpm. In terms of for-profit startups that replicate what we are calling the New News Organization, San Diego News Network is charging between $8-$10 cpm right now and they anticipate the rate will go higher once the economy recovers. For smaller startups and hyperlocals, we calculated a cpm from the time-based advertising rates. Here is a list of the folks who participated in our survey. Hopefully running through these two lists will answer some of your questions about where our numbers come from. Bottomline, we have data from a lot of sites that have been aggregated into the models.

Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog asks why the development costs for our Not-for-Profit model is not higher in the first year? We have on-staff developers built into our New News Organization and Not-for-Profit models, in addition to the development line item in the budget. So, yes, we anticipate that future businesses will continuously spend to update themselves. Perhaps we haven’t factored in enough of a front-end development cost.

Bradshaw also questions one of our conclusions, that this new news organization can actually be as profitable as we postulate. He writes on Online Journalism blog:

Also, I’m somewhat baffled by the projected margins of 29% by year 3 – those are the sorts of margins news organizations enjoyed during the ‘print bubble’© and led to the sort of debts and shareholders that have been just as problematic as advertisers.

It’s important to separate profit margins from revenues. The news organization we envision is much smaller, with $20 million in annual revenues, compared to the hundreds of millions in revenues enjoyed by print newspapers today. Of course, the new organization’s costs are smaller, too, hence the profit margins. That means those margins don’t require the huge capital investments made by newspapers in the past. The new online news organization will necessarily be more agile and flexible.

A point for some of those folks who think our assumptions are overly optimistic. Our goal was to project what happens when the daily newspaper in a large city has gone away. That’s the context for our numbers: what will advertisers do when they need to go to an online-only publication? In all of these cases, we are testing hypothetical models. That’s why we’ve posted the spreadsheets online. We’re asking you to put in your own assumptions and share them with us, please put your versions in the comments. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

Below is Jeff Jarvis’ presentation, which he made using new software from Prezi. Just click within the screen and advance to the next slide.

Click here to see the presentation in full-screen.

View the Not-for-Profit business model as a Google Document here. (To make changes to this document, simply click File>>Create a copy or File>>Export.)

Or, download it as an Excel file here.

Click here to see the other models. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)