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.

In sum, things weren't as bloody last year as people feared, but as we're seeing in Shore's New Rules of Engagement research fielded over the past few weeks, this doesn't mean that there aren't major change underway. Sounds like a good traditional report on FreePint's subscription base.

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.

What is an ebook? The panel offered various opinions, I liked Larry Schwartz's perspective, noting that he is distributing blogs in the same format as ebooks in some instance. Larry noted that 47 percent of ebook readers had viewed them on computers, with only a small percentage of these on ebook readers, and the ebook market overall still being a small percentage of the book market overall. The big issue for ebooks today, though, is not so much it total audience as it is how to get the market as a whole to grow across platforms. Nick Bogaty of Adobe still sees Amazon's Kindle as the leading platform, even as others enter the fray (it will be interesting to see what happens on the 27th with Apple's expected tablet announcement, rumors of a tie-up between Barnes & Noble and Apple are flying about). Chris Brown of Pearson noted that they are trying to balance focusing on users as authors along with working with traditional publishers.

Larry noted that this period of ebooks as one that is still very early days with non-color displays, he sees Apple's iPhone and soon Apple's tablet may help markets for ebooks to grow rapidly. He notes that everyone want the "holy grail" device, they don't want to travel with just another device. If you're on your couch, that's one thing, but for a business person it's different. Nick noted that customers have demonstrated that much demand for ebooks in trade, but in higher education and education in general there is much stronger demand. Christopher underscored this point, though he points out that the ebook reading devices are quite limited today for educational purposes. Asked later in the session if he thought that Apple's tablet would be an effective platform, he said simply, "I don't know."

Multimedia offers new opportunities for book publishers in this environment, he notes. However, when you are trying to distribute syndicated content through the day onto an ebook reader, though, Larry noted that the limited bandwidth available on Kindle's wireless network for downloads makes multimedia and blog distribution on Kindle and other devices that package in "free" wireless access impractical. However, there is a gadget "blip" in the short term for ebooks, Larry said, where new ebook reader releases tend to be followed by bursts of downloads of paid content onto the devices. However, this isn't really going to lead to long-term success if people aren't engaged with the content once it's downloaded. Christoper observed, rightly, I believe, that the people who said "content is king" and failed to adapt their products to mobile platforms effectively are now having to think differently.

Nick Bogaty noted that this is likely to be the year of the iSlate, but then interestingly noted that there would be many tablets will be coming out this year, emphasizing the importance of content portability. This means Adobe as a solution to Nick, but Jan Palmen noted that perhaps the issue is not so much portability but what a book really is at this time. Perhaps content aggregation is no longer going to be defined by publishers but consumer-based, at some point. Eleanor Haas noted in a comment that she advises customers to refer to their books as "titles" for their books, so that they can find them as products, but to lose the term "book" as a marketing tool. I think that this is a good approach. The "title" may be user-defined, but my sense is that the book publishing industry as we know it today will split into those who will enable user-defined collections of content from any number of sources, including self-published ebooks that have gained an online publishing, and on the other hand those who will look at the "best of the best" opportunities arising from online content packaging that can be given packaging for more permanent and broad distribution, be it through print or online models. The latter business will have great revenues, but the online model will be the one with better margins.

Color content is a promised new frontier from Apple's iSlate for ebook and emagazine content, but I think that this is another false hope for traditional publishers. We have had a color ebook reader for years; it's called a personal computer. What about an iSlate that is going to persuade publishers to commit to packaging on this new platform other than the obvious one: an online store with proprietary rights. As Larry Schwartz notes, Apple's announcement may be important as a catalyst to move publishers into ebook-style models, but unfortunately for these publishers their customers have been spending most of their time with other forms of online content for decades. Kudos to Apple for devising a seductive way to allow media companies to feel that they have surrendered to online markets with dignity, but ultimately that battle was lost long ago when HTML started forming readable content on millions of PCs around the world. It's great to see the market for ebooks developing rapidly, I hope that it grows based on Web standards that allow traditional editorial staffs to do what they do best while enabling premium packaging specialists to do what they do best as well.