What are the most important action items for news organizations to take?
• Talk to the market: Ask online viewers, newspaper readers, advertisers (and non-viewers, non-readers, non-advertisers) what they want and what the market would pay for.
• Examine your content. What do you have that is unique? Does it provide value? Can you charge for it? What is your competition doing? If you go to pay, how would they react? Be honest about what you have and your resources. Use a SWOT analysis: a strategic planning method used to evaluate your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
• Build consensus within the organization. You won't be successful if this is just a top-down mandate. Everyone must be on board to work toward its success.
• Build a perceived value in the content of your new websites that move beyond "free."

What new policies, standards, best practices, etc., need to be adopted in order to move forward in this area?
• Define what is free and what could be paid.
• Define the pay model - full lockdown of general site; partial lockdown or just charging for premium content; metered model or micropayments; charge for platform services, such as e-mail alerts, mobile, e-readers.
• Create a business plan - define the goals, define the risks, define the price point, define/select the technology provider, define success (or failure).
• Invest resources into the paid content model - commoditize the free, mobilize against the paid content. For example: Social networking or user-generated content could be free, more sophisticated or professional coverage could be paid.

What additional research or experimentation needs to be done?
• Tons. The industry needs information on the few projects under way. Gauge how others define success and failure. (For example, the publisher of the twice-weekly Fauquier Times-Democrat, tired of hearing the familiar refrain from his community that they would not pay to subscribe if they could get the news online for free, recently launched a short-term "radical experiment": stripping the content from his site, with the aim of studying the impact on print subscriptions and devising a more profitable strategy online. Stay tuned to the API Now blog for updates on this and other experiments with paid models.)

Group members: Peter Arundel of Times Community News, Mike Fogel of Hearst Newspapers, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive, and Colin O'Donnell of Paddock Publications Inc.