Downie discussed the many types of news organizations that have emerged in the wake of newspapers’ decline, focusing mostly on non-profit models, and then outlined his recommendations to help these new ventures survive. He based much of his speech on a massive report he recently co-wrote wrote, The Reconstruction of American Journalism.

Here’s a video of Downie discussing his recommendations. After the video is a list of the innovative news models he identified.

Here are the innovative news models he identified, with some examples:

Partnerships between universities and professional news organizations.

• Florida International University in southern Florida provides student reporting to The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post, and Sun Sentinel.

Downie said pro journalists shouldn’t be concerned about students taking their jobs. “More importantly, you have a healthy amount of collaboration,” he said. Professional journalists may have to scrap by with multiple jobs, Downie said, because gone are the days of high newspaper salaries from the last half of the 20th Century.

For-profit local news sites and aggregators

• San Diego News Network [disclosure: I work for the US Local News Network, the parent company of SDNN]. It combines stories from its own reporters with content from local community newspapers, radio, and television stations, and from bloggers, freelancers and wire services.

Independent non-profit local news organizations

• Voice of San Diego is supported by foundations, advertising, corporate sponsorships, and contributions from citizen “members,” similar a public radio station.

Hyperlocal news sites, both non-profit and for-profit, that cover neighborhoods. Many are experimenting with “pro-am” journalism, or collaboration with users, Downie said.

• Some examples are the nonprofit New Haven Independent in Connecticut and the for-profit New West network of Web sites in Montana.

Also, more public radio stations are gathering and reporting local news : Downie said, “It needs to be encouraged and it needs to grow a lot more now.”

He acknowledged that there will be some viable for-profit news organizations, but said they were too experimental to know which would work and which would not. So Downey’s focusing on recommendations for non-profit news: “Non-profits will have to succeed,” he said.

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:

• News ecosystems, where professionals share content with each other and with amateurs, are the new paradigm in news. CUNY’s own Jeff Jarvis often talks about news ecosystems. Gillmor said that some news organizations will lose out in this new ecosystem, but it will be better for news in the long-run: “Species come and go. It’s painful if you’re one of the species that goes,” he said.

• He showcased some of his students’ work as example of innovative interactive journalism: City Circles is an “information platform” for riders of Phoenix’s light rail. It uses Google Maps and Twitter to offer news, events, classifieds and promotions within five blocks of every train stop. Our Tribes is a site that helps Native Americans transition from the life on the reservation to city life. It features news and maps, health and employment resources, and tribal information and connections.

• “Data, data, data”: presenting data in new and interactive forms will be increasingly important. Gillmor discussed data visualization, such as a map that shows the growth of Walmart stores across America.

• Media will be on eyeglasses, called “heads-up displays,” and will be available to consumers within the next 10 years, Gillmor said. “Italy will be a tech power in the next few years,” he said, because of all its eye wear makers.

Chris Prentice contributed reporting.

The Local is run by students and faculty of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, in collaboration with The New York Times. Editors at the Times provide supervision to assure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards.

A new marketing campaign by the Times tells advertisers it has a better readership.

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.

But Sulzberger said that the Journal may be trying to take on too much: changing its coverage and innovating digitally when the Times and others are focusing on digital innovation. “This is no small feat,” he said.

Some have criticized the Times for cutting back its Metro staff in recent years. After the speech Sulzberger said that the fewer number of employees is not a fair indication of its local strength. “That’s baloney,” he said. Sulzberger pointed out that his reporters from other sections of the paper contribute to local coverage, including some from the sports and culture sections. “When you add them all up, it’s huge,” he said.

The Times launched this week a new marketing campaign for advertisers, including collateral materials that directly target the Journal. One promotional piece compares the two papers’ readership among “arts enthusiasts” “business professionals” and women. Previously, the Times had run similar ads but had not mentioned the Journal by name.

During his speech Sulzberger took some digs at Murdoch for criticizing Google. “I am not that other guy who rails against Google,” he said, while circling a finger around his ear like Murdoch’s crazy for doing so. Fighting with Google is like fighting oxygen, said Sulzberger, who said media companies should work with Google in the new media “ecosystem.”

For his part, Murdoch has run ads in his paper that say “Stay ahead of the times” and tout the Journal‘s “unprecedented investments in product innovation.”

Since he bought the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Co., for $5.6 billion in 2007, Murdoch has been developing a more general-news oriented paper. Some anticipate that the New York section will resemble the New York Sun, the sophisticated, politically conservative daily that shut down in 2008.

Sulzberger said that when he was an AP reporter in London and Murdoch purchased the Times of London he saw other publishers change their coverage to adapt, but ended up hurting themselves. “We’re going to stay with what we’re good at,” he said.

After the speech he added: “We’re much more committed, we’ve been there longer, it’s what we do.”

Writing for the web requires speed.  But it is better to be right than to be first, according to Lex Harris, managing editor of CNN Money.

“Don’t be too obsessed with getting beat,” said Harris.  “When you’re wrong, it just dogs you for so long a period.  It’s just not worth it.”

The panelists, who also included Marty Wolk, the executive business editor of MSBNC.com, offered no absolute directives on how to balance accuracy with speed.

They also recommended other key points to keep in mind:

• Writing for the internet does not have to be short.

• You have to be responsible for creating conversation. If you ask a question, you can control and focus that conversation.

• De-complicate.

• Utilize social networking sites.

• Don’t just use the web as a dumping ground for pieces that do not fit into your print publications.

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.

Ilyce Glink, media entrepreneur and consultant, leads a panel on commercial real estate. (Photo: Chris Prentice)

PHOENIX — Panelists could not agree on commercial real estate’s future in a seminar on “how to tell if the real estate recovery is real in your community” at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference in Phoenix, Ariz.

“We’re teetering on the brink, and we don’t know which way it’s going,”  panel moderator and real estate columnist Ilyce Glink said afterward.

Glink said the U.S. could enter a “double dip” recession, partially thanks to commercial real estate losses. The country is still losing jobs and tax revenues. If consumers cannot spend, retailers cannot afford their rents, and the recession cycle could start again, according to Glink.

But panel contributors James Woodwell, Senior Director of Research and Business Development at the Mortgage Bankers Association, and Pete Bolton, executive vice president and managing director of Grubb and Ellis’s Phoenix office, tried to emphasize the difference between commercial and residential real estate.

“These are businesses,” said Woodwell.  “We’ve seen dropping values of businesses nationwide.”

Property value for commercial real estate is directly linked to a business’s income, they said.  As retail businesses suffer, so does commercial real estate.

There was no bubble in commercial real estate, Bolton said.

He attributed the decline to investors’ hesitation and made comparisons with what he called the “RTC days” in the 1980s when the federal government created the Resolution Trust Corporation to liquidate insolvent assets during the savings and loan crisis. The current situation just a reaction to other economic issues.

Still, the panelists still could not get past the simple truth: things are bad out there.  “Commercial mortgages are clearly under stress,” Woodwell said.

They also did not know if the commercial real estate market had bottomed out.

Glink concluded with some tips for real estate journalists to make sense of the real estate chaos:

• Keep it local.
• The American Institute of Architects publishes indexes every month.
• Speak with land planner companies and others who do not have a political agenda. Their recovery will indicate overall recovery for commercial real estate.

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.