The revenue session at the Online Journalism Symposium in Austin, Texas, in April 2008 put four answers to the same question side by side.
Ken Riddick, vice president of digital media at Hearst Newspapers, opened with the least comfortable of them: newspapers were no longer a mass medium, so advertisers had choices, which meant lower prices and a need for far more volume. His conclusion was a change in sales strategy — chase smaller local businesses instead of the big-dollar accounts, and stop selling online space as an add-on to the print buy.
Richard Anderson, president of the community service VillageSoup.com, argued for something more structural: news organisations should aggregate content from professionals and amateurs rather than supply only what they control. The concrete part was his pricing. Local businesses paid $19.95 a week to post whatever they wanted, from special offers to goods for sale, and local estate agents paid $25 a year for slots in a property database they maintained themselves. In 2007 that produced $450,000 in online advertising revenue from a market of 80,000 people.
Michael Smith of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University ran through MLB, Meredith Media and Vorarlberg Medienhaus, drawing on the center’s report Running While The Earth Shakes, and reduced it to five points: customer experience, continuous innovation, investment in the workforce, community-building and partnership.
Staci Kramer of ContentNext Media, a company that grew out of a blog, offered the list from the other end — be patient, nimble, responsive, aware of readers, and able to find or create a need.