I spoke a bit about emerging business models to support these kinds of sites (and – plug warning – the work of my partners at GrowthSpur).

You should search on Twitter for the #ONAUAB hash for some of the fascinating discussions that grew out of the sessions. Less fascinating, perhaps, was my presentation – but for those who asked for it, it’s here.

(Why, yes – I used Prezi. My friend Tim Windsor snarks that Prezi screams 2009 the same way a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer screams 1983. But, hey, I liked a-ha.)

Also: Here’s Robert Hernandez’s excellent presentation on how journalists can use social media tools (both to build audience, and to be better reporters).

And @DannySanchez’s informative riff on free tools doesn’t have a perfect online analog – but he writes about nearly all of those tools (and even more) on his blog, Journalistopia.com.

Similarly, if you check out TwinsBaseball.com, you see video of home runs … but not an equally botched call that cost the Twins (disclosure: my favorite team) the game.

All credit to MLB Advanced Media: The glaring videos are available on the sites. You just have to hunt for them. (The Tiggers’ video is on the story-level page; the Twins/Mariners’ um, “infield single” is utterly buried on the site’s video ghetto.) Frankly, YouTube was easier. (Wondering if MLBAM has take-down notices flying this morning.)

A small thing, perhaps, in a world where cellphone and surveillance video is used as a publicity weapon in an international incident, and a major oil company is behaving like Keystone Kops in the Gulf – but one more tiny example of odd results when the economics of publishing change.

Here’s a bucket o’ links and resources I referred to in the discussion at the Knight Digital Media Center’s Entrepreneurial Boot Camp. (They may be useful, of course, to other journopreneurs.)

• First and foremost: As you think about revenue, don’t fixate on one source – no successful media outlet ever has. Look for several – specific ideas in this link .
• I freely admit that I’m a history geek (How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? Four – one to unscrew, three to give you the history of the old one all the way back to the landing of the first English colonists at Jamestown.) If you want to understand the context of today’s media revolution, here are some terrific (I’d say essential) readings.
• The number of independent news and information sites is exploding. To keep up – and to spot trends in sustainability – three sites are particularly helpful:

J-Lab at American University

The New Business Models for News project run by Jeff Jarvis at CUNY

The Collaboratory run by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at University of Missouri

• Several specific essays and blog posts have become intellectual watersheds of the independent-site phenomenon. I’d encourage you to read Jay Rosen’s “the people formerly known as the audience” piece – it reads like a manifesto. Similarly, Jeff Jarvis’  notion of “do what you do best, link to the rest” is critical. If you ever need to remind anyone of what’s at stake, Clay Shirky’s talk at Harvard in late 2009 is calmly frightening. Scared? Good. Now, for a glimmer of hope, read James Fallows’ piece on how Google just might not be the enemy Rupert et al think it to be.
• Enough of the intellectual stuff. Let’s get to work. And because we’re broke entrepreneurs, we’ve got to do it cheaply. Here’s some free and low-cost stuff.
• Finally, something to keep an eye on. It’s no exaggeration to say that Journal Register Company historically ran some of the worst newspapers in America – small-town dailies and weeklies with antiquated equipment, dispirited staffs, crushing debt and Dickensian management policies. New CEO John Paton is dragging it out of bankruptcy with a refreshing “question everything” style. JRC’s Ben Franklin Project set a goal of publishing an existing daily and weekly using nothing but free and open-source tools – and succeeded. It’s brilliant experimentation, worth stealing.

Also: Here’s the link Susan Mernit mentioned to Brad Feld’s VC site.

As part of the prep work, I’ve re-read a hefty stack of posts about emerging revenue models for news – advertising-supported for-profits, L3Cs, non-profit structures, even the wishful-thinking paid-content model.

Running through many of the pieces was an irksome thread: A focus on single solutions. Most framed the discussion in terms of “what’s the source of revenue,” as if there were a magic bullet that can solve every operation’s money woes.

There isn’t, of course. What’s more important, though, is there never has been. In times like these, naiveté isn’t charming – and for entrepreneurial journalists, it can be downright dangerous.

No successful news media organization has ever relied solely on a single source of revenue. In fact, the most successful industry segments – newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations – have long had many revenue sources, almost too many to list.

There’s more elaboration – and a rough list of the different sources — in this deck.

Key takeaways:

-  Don’t think too broadly. Even something as seemingly straightforward as “advertising” isn’t a single source of revenue. There are myriad advertising products – each with distinct strengths and weaknesses, sets of customers and sales models.

- As you plan the revenue models for your own proto-business (that’s what start-up journalism sites are, folks), copy the best of traditional organizations. Find multiple streams of revenue.

(Lest this come off as too scolding: I think it’s fantastic to see journalists actually interested in this sort of question. For decades, most of us acted as if the money that powered our organizations was created by magic. Worse, some assumed that it was the result of their brilliant journalism. For a welcome example of incisive, if tardy, analysis, see James Fallows’ terrific Atlantic piece on Google and the news industry.)

(People who make up asinine policies first need to understand the underlying technology.)

Hat tip @JeffJarvis – who will not seek damages for me linking to him.

Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, flogged his usual paywall-as-a-defense argument: In a world where online users are worth less than print readers, he seems to say don’t bother with the former. “Why would I want to be platform agnostic when I can get (ad rates of) $40 (per thousand print readers) instead of $4?”

 I was reminded of two recent, similar quotes:

•  An analysis ascribed to Washington Post president Steven Hills in a devastating New Republic piece on the paper’s woes: Post print readers are worth $500 a year in revenue; online readers are worth only $6.
• Rupert Murdoch’s assertion that users will cough up for online content: “When they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying.”  

Hussman and Hills are both falling for the same “defense first!” mentality that has crippled innovation at newspapers. They’re implicitly assume print readership will stay the same forever (it isn’t ), and that print ad revenues will maintain, too (they aren’t).

Rupert is making an even bigger mistake. He assumes “nowhere else to go,” conveniently forgetting that his media empire was built on expensive printing plants and government broadcast licenses, each of which makes competition economically unfeasible.

Clearly, Rupe hasn’t noticed that those monopolies are gone (or maybe he’s blustering). Local television stations are emerging as real competitors  to newspaper sites in many markets. Some, like Allbritton Communications in Washington, are building separate sites to target niches and general news. And there are plenty of independent  local  sites, with new ones springing up all the time. On their own, they may not seem formidable. But enough of them in a community could ruin a local newspaper publisher’s day. No wonder potential entrepreneurs are licking their chops.

 (The ease of publishing via free services like WordPress  and Blogger are a key reason that “information wants to be free.” More on that, including some semi-geeky economic theory, another day.)

 If competition makes paywalls nothing more than defense (and the numbers sure seem to make that case), then what’s a better answer? What gets at Hussman and Hills’ arguments that print readers are worth more?

Let’s take this out of the emotional world of change for a second, and into the dispassionate world of math. Everyone remember the commutative and associative properties from third grade?

If your print readers are worth 10 times your online users, then work to get 10 times the number of online users. You’ll make the same amount of money. (Actually, you’ll end up with more – production costs are lower on digital platforms. No paper, no trucks.)

Daunting? Sure. Simply regurgitating your print product in digital formats won’t grow your audience ten times. No single product will, either.

But a network of niche products is part of the answer.

So is good app for the iPad (and don’t forget the waves of similar devices that are sure to follow).

It also means forcing the business side of the house to think clearly and execute.  And it means engaging in biz-side thinking ourselves.

If our goal is to grow our audiences again – not merely milk the ones we have – we have to engage consumers. We have to give them what they want, when, where and how they want it.

Yes, it’s not easy. Innovation never is.

But doing nothing – or hiding behind a paywall – merely guarantees a slow, lingering death for newspapers. That’s unfair to shareholders, to employees – and ultimately to the communities we serve.

Watching all the hoopla – on multiple media platforms at once – gives us all another lesson on the folly of the paid-content argument from some traditionalists.

We’re baseball freaks in this household. I’ve been a fan of the Minnesota Twins since long before the last time they played a home game outdoors. My wife jokes that she was born within sight of Shea Stadium. Our first date included a raucous discussion of which team had denuded their farm system more badly through stupid trades. (Hint: It was the Mets.)  The poor kids didn’t have a choice.

So as the Twins open Target Field today, I’m watching via the MLB Extra Innings package on Verizon FiOS ($179 this year). If I have to run to get one of the kids, I’ll be able to keep an ear on things via Sirius-XM Radio ($12 a month, and baseball is the only reason I keep satellite radio). As backup (or while traveling), I can tap the MLB.TV feed.

As I write this, it’s three hours before the game, and thousands of fellow Minnesotans are gathered outside the stadium. (How do I know? Webcams.)  After the Twins thump the BoSox today (crossed fingers), I’ll read every word I can find, especially on the Star-Tribune’s excellent blogs by LaVelle E. Neal and Joe Christensen. I gleefully wallow in the modern media soup.

Oh – and my wife sprung for a 20-game season ticket package this year for me. Yes, I live 1,250 miles away. Your point?

What’s hard to remember is this sort of overload wasn’t always so. (I had an extended conversation many years ago with a presidential candidate right after my team beat his in the World Series. We swapped stories about the insane lengths we went to – driving to the top of hills outside town! – to pull in games on AM radio skips.)

Not so many years ago that only a handful of each team’s games were televised – maybe 50 a year, almost all of them away games. The troglodyte owners thought that allowing people to watch every game would “devalue the product” and lead inexorably to declining attendance.

They made a couple of basic mistakes: First, they assumed that they were primarily in the business of selling tickets to games – not making money through multiple channels. Second, they thought that watching a game on TV was a perfect substitute for the experience of sitting in the ballpark.

Over the past 25 years or so – thanks in no small part to the phenomenal cable-TV success of some truly awful Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves teams – baseball owners figured it out. Make money by selling TV rights to every game. Split the games up between over-the-air and cable broadcasters. Offer those feeds through any possible medium (even video on mobile devices this year).

Do all that right, and it won’t harm attendance – it’ll whet appetites.

(Yes, one result of this is seemingly absurd contracts. But at least Mauer didn’t sign with the Godless Empire.)

Here’s what this has to do with the eternal (and infernal) paid-content debate: Newspaper owners who stubbornly insist that people will pay for news on the web because, well, they should are behaving like baseball owners of old.

The results speak for themselves.

Instead of fighting to wall off the web, innovate on other platforms – not just the iPad, though that’s a start. Figure out what consumers want in different circumstances, then how to use technology to deliver that information. They won’t always pay for it – but they will sometimes, and there’s an ad model out there for just about every transmission vehicle.

Give your audience what they want – when, where and how they want it. For God’s sake – Bud Selig doesn’t even do e-mail, yet even he was smart enough to figure that out.

(OK, Bob DuPuy figured it out. But Bud let him.)

He’s the creator of WordPress, one of the free tools that’s reinventing the world of media and the very definition of what it means to be a “journalist.”

How does Mullenweg justify giving away the results of years of work? Then working more untold hours on upgrades (helllll-ooooo Version 3!)? Then giving it away, too?

Simple: He builds complementary businesses that play in the WordPress eco-system.

You can set up your blog at WordPress.com for free. Want extra features – like truly massive amounts of storage for video, or a custom domain name? Pay a few bucks a year.

His company, Automattic, does other things, too. It provides hosting services for high-volume blogs. It builds paid add-ons for sites, like poll/ratings widgets. His latest is a service that makes it easy to create backups for WordPress sites – especially people who run large blog networks – for less than $20 a month.

None of these fees are large themselves, but they add up.

There’s a lesson there for journopreneurs:  Don’t get embroiled in the endless, economically unviable wishful thinking about paid content on the web. Relent and give the content away – then figure out how to make money elsewhere in the ecosystem.

That could be slick, intuitive and innovative delivery mechanisms – especially on tablets and mobile devices.

It could be building real communities around topic pages, comments and local blog networks, and serving as a sales-and-servicing agent for them. Or banding that community together for group-buying experiences.

Or – and this is the fun, scary part – it could be an idea that no one has figured out yet. One of just might.

(This is why one of my icons at Gravatar – another of Mullenweb’s companies – is a mad scientist. A small prize, and an AARP card, to the commenter who first identifies him. ;-) ).

(Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s Ark she wrote for a youth group.

Scene: Noah’s sons talking after God commands their father to build an ark:

Son 1:  You know what this means?

Son 2: Dad has to make a trip to the hardware store.

From her online musings on a random Wednesday:

“Sometimes I wish the newspaper was as interesting as my Twitter stream.”

Discuss, please.