Gaby Darbyshire kicked off the panel with a great summary of the shifting role of blogs and traditional news outlets, emphasizing that in a world in which facts can be collected so easily many traditional media organizations are going to have to focus on more in-depth analysis and commentary, a trend already underway in some ways. Cheryl Milone's Article One Partners helps patent holders increase quality and avoid disputes through a global research community. Jim Fowler runs Jigsaw's crowdsourced database of company and contact information, building "data as a service" capabilities for both enterprises and individuals, piping real-time updates to them as their sources provide validated information.

"Nobody cares about privacy," Jim notes, meaning that in an era in which basic facts on people are so widely available, the fact that people are contributing information about other people who they have in their contacts is an accepted practice these days. This allows Jigsaw to deliver content updates more rapidly through disruptive a business model than incumbents such as Dun and Bradstreet, Henry Blodget noted. Henry emphasized the importance of "good enough" information from disruptors such as Gawker, but often in business information "good enough" that's more up-to-date and accurate in domains that traditional sources simply don't collect is more than good enough - it's better, at least for a limited range of content.

What happens to companies like The New York Times in this mix? Gaby noted that it will be more towards 2011 before the Times implements this approach, perhaps allowing the idea to percolate through people's minds, much in the way that politicians sometimes leak ideas of what they may be doing to gauge public reaction to the idea and others' implementations before committing to a new model. This is probably especially important, given their semi-retreat from a hybrid paid model. Henry noted a newspaper that had spend $4 million on implementing a paywall system that elicited only 35 signups, which may be part of the reason for this gun-shyness, but my assumption is that NYT and others will be implementing this new service on a phased rollout basis, trying via an A/B testing regimen where the value points may be.

Why don't traditional firms do more of what the disruptors? Cheryl notes that they incentivize their community, with seven-figure payouts in some instances for providing research, so it's a model that may be foreign to their competitors. Jim noted that the real-time update nature of their content's change is the real value point; instead of selling data per se, they focus on selling freshness within their domain. 40 percent of Jigsaw's enterprise clients share their data, presumably in most instances from their "golden source" master files. Knowing that having this information provides limited competitive advantage on a proprietary basis, Jigsaw clients gladly trade breadth of older data with freshness from whatever source it comes from. This creates, Jim believes, "why would I go anywhere else" types of business models.

It turns out, Henry believes, that it can be very hard for a company to fight off a disruptor that is using technologies that aren't scaled to take advantage of their traditional strengths. Gaby sees publishers such as the NYT "hide-bound" by their attachment to their traditional image of well-established success, whereas sites like Gawker focus more on site metrics to understand what content is successful in the moment. The way to build a sustained audience via these metrics is to do more in-depth content in ways that print journalism can't do effectively. Traditional "credibility" and "brilliance" aren't similar metrics and harder to monetize, ultimately, in the moment-by-moment world of Web publishing. Henry suggests that the NYT should consider looking at the 20 percent of their writers that produce 80 percent of their revenues and to either teach the others to do what they do - and, presumably, to suggest alternatives for them if they can't.

"Be impatient for profit, but patient for growth," Jim observes, pointing out that it's important for disruptors to work hard to find winning formulas that will scale, rather than scaling before you understand what really works. It's good business sense, but a concept that was neglected in the Blodget-driven dot-com era's focus on clicks rather than sustainable business models. Jim notes that late entrants can go out and buy players to help them catch up with the disruptors, but Gaby notes that "you can milk the cash cow, but eventually the cow will die." As traditional media shrinks, buying or killing your competitors will become harder for established media companies.

In the short run, large companies looking at disruptors may try to minimize them, but since many of these companies are small private companies that can innovate and change plans without as much scrutiny and legal overhead, it's hard to ignore them. On the other hand, sometimes disruptors can be "frenemies," as in Jigsaw's successful business relationship with Dun and Bradstreet that supplies D&B with Jigsaw content. "They've been a great partner for us, they've taught us a ton about how to sell our data and it gives it credibility," he notes. Win-win partnerships can work out often, and I agree with Ken Doctor that many media companies will be seeking these kinds of partnerships as they see key capabilities being developed by others that they cannot replicate effectively.

Great panel, I have to get ready for my presentation, now, thanks to Henry for doing a great job of leading a great discussion.

Jim Colleger has an amazing knack to assemble impressive C-level panelists, this one was no exception. Jim kicked off his "skate to where the puck is" session by asking Dick Harrington how he made the decision to sell Thomson's print divisions at more than $4 billion. Dick noted that he saw that eBay was growing rapidly and was typical of services that were going to kill newspaper classified advertising. But Harrington noted also that in B2B markets Thomson developed technology assets that enabled them to provide workflow-based products and services in a more client-centric approach to enterprise publishing. Thomson Reuters is still a work in progress, but how far it came under Harrington's leadership is impressive.

Andrew Lack of Bloomberg, LP's multimedia group was brought on to help Bloomberg integrate their media assets more effectively. He enjoys not having "analysts crawling up your backside" as being part of a private company, which enables it to look at the cost structure for its 2,000-plus reporters around the world and to repurpose them aggressively for professional audiences through media and enterprise distribution channels. Of course, when Bloomberg's revenues come primarily from its enterprise financial trading services, you have the luxury of looking at media markets with the comfort of stronger financial support than many news media companies face. Lack wants Bloomberg to be "among the most influential news producers in the world," but not with the same profit requirements hanging over their heads that a company such as Dow Jones may face with a far less robust enterprise revenue stream. Lack is planning to take these news assets and focus more on consumer markets, presumably, as I noted earlier in ContentBlogger, to take on Dow Jones' recently consolidated enterprise and media assets more effectively. Lack didn't give too many hints on competing with the WSJ Online "freemium" model, but it's a given that they will have that option based on their strong branding from enterprise markets that appeals to many consumer investors.

David Eun focused on YouTube's relationship to Google's overall mission, seeing video as data that can be connected with audiences. Google takes a long-term view of markets at YouTube, seeing that it would need to be easy to use as the key goal. The growth of YouTube is staggering, with more than a billion views per day, but business models are now a key focus also. This seems to sync in with Ken Auletta's earlier comments about driving more revenues from premium content, and certainly syncs with YouTube's efforts to deliver more premium content via YouTube. It turns out that free is amazing and great, but people like paying for stuff, too.

Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service noted that the concept of value is key to success in content markets, where there is more direct pay for value and less emphasis on ad-supported access. He notes, though, that Google's "fortuitous" implementation of ads as their revenues sources changed everything. Today, kids don't expect to pay for media ever. "That's a long time to wait," Anderson notes. The old world of "I'll tell you what to watch and when to watch it" is gone, though, and the customer's perception of value is in the drivers' seat. There is a generational gap, however, in which more adult people are more willing to pay, be it just general maturity or a generational difference. He believes that these people entering the workforce will be willing to pay for services such as Westlaw (I am not sure that our own research bears that out).

David Eun pointed out, though, that there are many different kinds of value transactions. "The challenge is that most [video] advertising doesn't work, you have to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time." Eun believes that ads will work, especially if you think of ads as content, and begin to think not just about keyword matches but audience matches. Thinking of Apple's iTunes store, he sees that people are willing to pay for well-designed, convenient services, a concept that should be applicable to other types of content. Lack noted that the model for purchasing music via iTunes is not attractive to most music producers, but with the music industry competing with piracy at the time and seeing its whole model going down the drain rapidly, he was able to corral music publishers into the iTunes platform fairly rapidly. Today, he notes, subscription models have new meaning, in part because of iTunes and other mobile-oriented ecommerce models.

Jim asked if today's Kindles and tablets are actually dedicated terminals in a different packages. Anderson noted that there is a limit as to how many of these devices people will buy. "It's all going to the same place, it's nine inches by seven inches and will do your email." To me, that is a compelling rationale for cost-effective, open source Google Chrome OS devices conquering the tablet markets globally in 2011. Harrington notes, though, that you have to be very vertical, rather than very horizontal, to make money in the content industry today. He's right in an important way, of course, but that's not necessarily a concept that you can tie to a hardware platform: a tablet is not a vertical any more than a Bloomberg terminal is, or was, a vertical. It's the markets that they serve that are verticals, verticals which are increasingly real-time verticals of markets as small as one or a few people in a given moment.

This has been a great panel, though my overall impression is that although most publishers have accepted the reality of digital markets, they have not necessarily accepted their place in them. I agree with Mark Anderson that publishers shouldn't be shy about charging for valuable products and services, but it has to be more than a self-declared artificial scarcity that defines the uniqueness and value of their capabilities. The three billion-plus people empowered as publishers around the world, including businesses that are using content to create transactions on a different level than most publishers do, are competing for the value equation of publishing. What we're talking about emerging is a robust but far more specialized publishing industry which still provides highly valuable content, often on a paid basis, but which recognizes that the world has moved on to an era in which they can no longer dictate platforms arbitrarily and expect to succeed for any significant length of time.

iPhone app that provides text-to-audio for reference and services. Multimedia content "that enriches your experience in the moment." Aggregates content from different sources such as tour guides, Wikipedia, enabling different voices. Integrates with map functions, coming out on Android shortly. Looking to aggregate and distribute broadly. Nokia, RIM, feature phones targeted also, looking to target navigation companies. In top 50 iPhone apps in 2009. Content is personalized, an "army" of voice artists. Monetizes through freemium downloads, ads, sponsors, partners such as Starbucks, OpenTable, CitySearch. Not an unusual model overall, but the audio is an interesting angle, audio is hot right now and others are lagging in services and content technologies (my Nexus One excluded, natch :-). If you're developing mobile apps, here's a content partner that can help you to enrich your tool rapidly.

Physicians are videotaping their medical procedures, they provide a community that collects and organizes this content, partners such as Elsevier, some content is developed by ORLive, others are submitting directly. Audiovisual-equipped operating rooms, branded channels available. Not a high-volume model, very targeted distribution, but still 2.5 million uniques and 85,000 registrants. Helps to drive patient volumes (equals sales), increases procedure adoption rates, improves training on new equipment. Claims ROI exceeds 1000% regularly. An excellent, focused product that makes the best of content, community and online distribution models for professional markets. "Operationally funded." Kudos.

Mobile apps services, ex-OmniPoint/T-Mobile networks, average movile site gets only average 2 uniques per month (this is a key point, search and social media not available to expose these apps effectively, can't "tweet" them easily). Carriers "lock down" users, similar to aggregators locking out publishers from database discovery stats. Snac offers a customizable dashboard for mobile discovery. Downloadable app, alternative home screen, integrated search use environment. Has won awards. There's some potential on the top end of the market, especially since there's still a lot of platform and carrier balkanization, but I'd say that feature phones are the most likely target. "Walled Garden" approach offers promise for content producers trying to devise their own strategy for telco networks that's more consistent across carriers and platforms. Not on iPhone, they exclude, of course. Cross-platform approaches are key, interesting tool towards that goal.

Auletta noted that Google's approach to solving problems is key to their success. Early on, they recognized that what my people were calling "information" was in fact a media business. They rather denied that early on in their investor and media statements, of course, but as they have had more of an indisputable position in media they are less shy about using the "M" word. Auletta related a story of an ad salesperson trying to sell SuperBowl TV ads to Google, and Google couldn't figure out why they would want to buy something that had such poor metrics. Google may be "messing with the magic" of advertising, but in an online world based on trusted relationships rather than seduction, the mascara running off of the face of the old magic was inevitable.

Google's strength, Auletta noted, was also in the "why not" factor in looking at opportunities in the content industry, such as with its news search engine and book scanning project, concepts that came out of Google's commitment to allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on new "why not" ideas for content products and services. Why not cloud computing services, why not Android, why not...well, you get the picture. In the meantime, Auletta notes, media companies were "blind," investing lightly in digital technologies early on. In an interview with Intel's Andy Grove, Grove noted that a company has to plant their flag on the moon and stay there, assuming that you'll get some benefits. He believes that media companies also erred by placing engineers were down in the belly of most media companies, not near the top of typical media organizations. Instead, they farmed out technologies to companies like IBM and Microsoft.

Do you sacrifice your existing business for a "may be" business? Often, Auletta said, media companies were unwilling to take the big risk on new opportunities. In the short run, he sees that Google is doing great things for people, lowering the cost of advertising and information access for the average person. In the long run, though, he notes that if news becomes a free or very cheap commodity, the question becomes how talent rises to the top through the recognition offered by major media organizations. Thinking about the great expense of a typical TV episode, usually around $6-8 million, user-generated content from outlets such as YouTube is not anywhere near that level. Even Google recognizes that they need more professionally-produced content, knowing in part that ads cannot be their only major source of revenues from content. This came to light fairly recently in Auletta's interviews with Google's executives, coming in part in light of the economic downturn. Auletta sees more of a push by Google to enable paid content, with metered approaches, "firewalls" and so on.

Even Google has to fight the commoditization battle, Auletta observes. A stat he mentions; the average reader on nytimes.com spends 30 minutes a month on the site, versus the average reader of the paper edition spending 30 minutes a day engaged with their content. The battle is necessary, but not easy. Auletta sees the Googles of the world and traditional media companies coming together to try to build ways that can "save" them. But in his interviews with Google's leaders they revealed that they knew that it was important for Google to allow traditional media outlets to be independent, a factor highlighted by recent issues with government involvement with content distribution in China.

When will the unique leaders of Google move on to other things? Auletta observes that Schmidt and Brin have sold off some stock lately, perhaps to enjoy life, but it does raise the question of what happens to Google in the long run. Thinking of the inefficiencies of search engines and the personal efficiencies of social media, Auletta wonders whether there may be a connection here. "They don't know how to manage emotional intelligence," he said, relaying a story about Brin asking why he wouldn't publish the book for free on the Web. Auletta responded, would you ask a teacher to work for nothing? Who would pay him to come out to speak to them? Who would edit it and market it? Brin changed the subject quickly. Auletta saw this as an instinctual attitude towards copyright. I am not sure that I agree with him on this point, I think that it's more of an instance of what happens when that "engineer in the boiler room" makes it to the C-suite. Technical people have different attitudes, and that's generally neither right or wrong, good or evil.

If, as Auletta notes, even people in Silicon Valley see the Internet as the most disruptive technology the world has ever seen, then you have to confront the speed of change. It took 70 years for electricity to reach half of the U.S. people; it took the Web 9 years to reach half of the people in the U.S., and only five years for Facebook. "It should scare the s**t out of you," says Auletta. From my own perspective as the author of Content Nation, I am not scared at all. I say this from the perspective of someone who used to work at Bell Laboratories in an era in which major corporations invested heavily in new technologies to feed their futures. Companies that invest in the future help economies; companies that milk the present steal from our futures. While the winners in today's publishing world may not benefit from everything that Google has done, the average person in a village or in a flat in a major city in a developing nation has far more to gain from Google's right-brain approach to publishing. Thinking back to comments on Galileo from Elsevier's Hansen at the opening of this conference, I can't think of a time when scroll publishers were wanting to burn printing press developers at the stake. Technology is a medium, not a social or economic threat in and of itself.

I think that Auletta is a great journalist, and he's done an excellent job of helping us to gain insights into Google's inner thinking. However, there is ultimately in his outlook the elitism that has lead to the publishing industry's very vulnerability to Google's strengths. In a Q&A I asked him about the concept he raised about having an engineer at the right hand of a media company's CEO as a desirable idea. But he couldn't quite accept the idea of it being okay for that engineer to be the head of that company. There is a "they" aspect to Auletta's outlook that is, ultimately, not shared by the 3-plus billion people using the Web and mobile services to consume and publish content via Google and other services. Should people be afraid when the world becomes a nation of publishers? Perhaps so, in the sense that the changes put in motion by Content Nation are definitely shifting bases of power globally. But if the world as a whole gains more power through more people being more efficient and effective publishers, then the ultimate shift in publishing's power base to a wide global base of empowered publishers, including professional publishers, then the world as a whole is going to benefit doubtlessly. The media houses of New York nearby this conference are not likely to resemble the empty factories of my New England childhood any time soon, but understanding what being "Googled" is all about will be necessary to prevent that from happening. Thanks, Ken, a great presentation.

The clinical opportunity is particularly important, given the inefficiencies that exist in the delivery of medical services and the limited resources that the typical patient has at their disposal. Hansen highlighted that the typical doctor in the U.S. has about six minutes of contact with a patient in a typical visit - an almost real-time window in which to make decisions about health care. No small surprise, then, that Hansen underscored the fact that only about 30 percent of people in the U.S. are actually getting proscribed treatments for their medical problems. This means, of course, that you're dealing with a type of content user that has not been the target of Elsevier services typically, one that has risks that your typical publisher's legal department will be wary to take on. As a questioner noted after Hansen's speech, there is also the question of who will be willing to pay for clinically-oriented services. But when you think of the number of questions that need to be answered on a given day, there are more potential points of interaction in clinical settings than typical research environments overall.

Hansen noted that the sales force incentives at Elsevier has been tuned to meet with some of this shift, but it's also a major shift to get products and strategy in line with what is in essence a real-time content integration strategy. For example, Elsevier has launched PageBurst, a platform that helps nurses and others in clinical settings to get access to critical medical information, a platform that Elsevier uses for their own content but is open to all kinds of content, including content from competitors. This underscores an emerging theme in enterprise content of many sectors embracing the content integration strategies that Wall Street publishers embraced decades ago to fight the commoditization of their content. It's a strategy that's not without its risks and revenue exposures, but necessary if scientific publishers are to improve their long-term outlook. Thanks to Michael for a great kickoff talk, getting to the heart of what major enterprise publishers must embrace to succeed in a time when "heresies" in STM publishing are becoming the new order of things quite rapidly.