In one of the more cerebral talks of the convention, the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Dan Gillmor, talked about some of the latest innovations in multimedia interactive reporting.

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship

The session was titled “Turning passive users into active ones.” Gillmor didn’t give many concrete tips to engage an audience, but went through some of the latest trends and ideas. Here are a few:

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PHOENIX — Finally, he acknowledges his new neighbor. But Arthur Sulzberger Jr. won’t be inviting Rupert Murdoch out for dinner anytime soon.

When The Wall Street Journal opens its New York section next month the Times will be ready to compete, said Sulzberger, New York Times Co. Chairman, at a convention of journalists Saturday. Before that, Times Co. executives had said very little about their new competitor beyond a veiled advertising campaign against the Journal.

“We don’t shy away from competition,” Sulzberger said in a keynote speech at the annual convention of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix.

Murdoch’s News Corp. is spending about $15 million on the expansion into the New York Market, where the Times courts high-end readers and advertisers. The Journal reporters will cover local politics, business, culture and sports.

“We believe that in its pursuit of journalism prizes and a national reputation, a certain other New York daily has essentially stopped covering the city the way it once did,” Murdoch said in speech earlier this month.

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Arthur Sulzberger Jr. spoke at the SABEW's annual convetion (Photo: Mike Reicher)

PHOENIX -

The New York Times is building a metered pay wall debuting in 2011, but still figuring out where to put it.

The pay wall will allow readers free access to stories initially, but after a certain number of page views or another metric, readers will have to pay. The Times decided that another stream of revenue was needed as they continue to develop their digital advertising model.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the paper, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference, said the strategy was designed for the nytimes site, given its national and international reach. But he didn’t recommend it for other newspapers, including the Boston globe, a sister publication, because of its local focus.

Figuring out how to quantify reader’s usage is difficult. Readers don’t see 10 clicks on a photo slideshow as similar to 10 different page views, Sulzberger said, and neither should the paper. He’s also uncertain on how the more than 60 blogs on the site will be monitored as well, including CUNY’s Local and NYU’s upcoming East Village site.

Sulzberger explained that the success of the new project is “inextricably connected to the promise of quality journalism.” The Times research and development department, which was started to explore digital initiatives, is spearheading the transition.

That translation decided against a possible “iTunes model,” where consumers buy songs for around a dollar. That model would do the same per story, but unlike music, readers are unlikely to enjoy a story over and over again, Sulzberger said.

He avoided forecasts on how successful the pay wall will be, focusing on the current environment, saying “It’s what the Times needs to do today,” and added “It will take time to get this right.”

The paper expects to lose some traffic from people who refuse to pay, but are confident loyalists will continue to support the paper. News on the iPhone app will continue to be free.

The Times has started an ad campaign for its New York coverage as the paper will be competing with the Wall Street Journal’s New York edition which debuts next month.

Google is synonymous with search, but could be onto to something greater: inference. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and tweaker of Google’s search algorithm since 2001, says search is beyond key words and at the door step of understanding language.

Amit Singhal discusses the future of search at the SABEW conference. (Photo: Chris Prentice)

Singhal speaking at the annual SABEW convention in Phoenix used some examples. If you google “GM cars,” you get General Motors, but if you google “GM food,” you get genetically-modified.

“Search is about matching meaning to what users want,” he said.

Another example, if you google “panasonic lock TV,” you get hits about “parental control.” Singhal says marketers probably didn’t like the word “lock” and went with the nicer “control.” But Google infers the difference. Other interests to journalists:

• Information wants to be free he said, but that doesn’t mean Web sites shouldn’t impose a pay wall, citing that good content costs money. But differentiating that good content from “McContent” – quick, cheap generated content – is difficult since the language between the two is often similar.

• Web content is suppose to be free. And citizens with information are better ones. Singhal sees China inhibiting its best interest by restricting search.

• The Future of web search is still based on the what made google popular: speed. “We are crazy about speed,” Singhal says. He noted that if a users is slowed down by 200 milliseconds, the site will end up losing traffic. Revelvance algorithms are now more important than ever, he said. “As the amount of information has exploded, the importance of relevance has gone through the roof,” he said.

• The kind of information that people seek on phones is much different than what people search for on their computer. Singhal sees a future in location-based advertising.

After a year of looking through internal inefficiencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to specialized departments and away from generalists handling a variety of cases.

Robert Khuzami, SEC Director of Enforcement, in a seminar at SABEW’s annual conference said that they found the organization to be management heavy and lacking centralized protocol between departments. With increased funding, the SEC’s five new departments will help manage the deluge of tips – 700,000 last year – with officers concentrating on asset management, market abuse, structured new products, corporate bribery and municipal securities.  The revamp will be complete by mid-April as the departments finish hiring.