"Where's the Innovation in Business Models?"

So asks Chris O'Brien, a San Jose Merc-News business writer, in a very thoughtful blog post on PBS.org's IdeaLab Website. Many of us in the newsroom have been asking this same question of our company's leaders, for months, if not the past few years. And I'm pretty sure we asked this question about 18 different ways at the big meeting last week, but answers were thin.

O'Brien says:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don't see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

And further down, he states:

There is an enormous, untapped opportunity for innovation around the business model. This is where the conversation needs to go. There needs to be a new revenue model that will support some form of authoritative journalism, one that ideally exists in tandem with an expansive community journalism element and that is able to be optimized for any platform used by its audience (print, online, TV, mobile, etc.).