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

In an effort to add to the paid-content discussion, we’ve built two versions of a paid model. The first is a “pure” paid content model where 100% of the main news site sits behind a pay wall. The other is a hybrid model that envisions keeping up to 80% of the content available for free. Both models have four scenarios with varying subscriber and fee levels (the hybrid model has additional variables for the level of free content, set at 50% and 80%). As with most of our models, Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang at Mignon Media helped us build these paid versions and provided invaluable guidance and insight throughout.

Download the full paid version here and the hybrid here.

If you’ve taken a peek at any of the other models we produced and presented to the Aspen Institute you’ll see many of the revenue and expense components are repeated here. We’ve kept our staffing assumptions roughly the same and this news organization can take advantage of some of the same revenue opportunities (like events, coupons, and a range of services to local businesses) that are open to a free metro-wide publication.

Here are a few take-aways on the paid models:
- According to our assumptions, the main site of the fully paid model loses millions throughout the 3-year period.
- In three out of four scenarios, the main site in the hybrid model is profitable in year 3 (with the B-to-C and B-to-C services, it could be profitable in year 2).
- Profitability rises along with the level of free content.

To account for the impact of a paywall on advertising, we have made some notable adjustments from our New News Organization model:
- We’ve reduced the average sponsorship revenue assumption to $100 per week from $1500.
- We also reduced the commission the organization takes on ads sold into a metro-wide ad network to 2% from the 20% estimated in the free version.

I’m guessing that some folks will take issue with a few of those assumptions. As always, we hope you will tell us where exactly we’ve gotten it wrong. Plug your own numbers into light-blue cells on the “Paid Model Options” page and then send your spreadsheet back to us. If you prefer to work in Google Docs, the full paid model is here while the hybrid model is available here. (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.)

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.

We’ve already gotten a great response from dozens of bloggers and publishers, including Anali’s First Amendment, based in Quincy, MA, and The Windy Citizen from Chicago, to name just two. Thank you!

But, we want to hear from all of you. Visit our survey page in the sidebar and follow the link to the survey. After you’ve finished, send it along to your your online publishing colleagues.

(If you did not get an invite from us, don’t freak out! We tried really hard to come up with a comprehensive list, but it’s just really hard to find all of you.)

Finally, rest assured that your information will be treated confidentially. The data we collect will be used only in the aggregate and will not be associated in any identifiable way with an individual website.