INDUSTRY COLLABORATION
• News organizations need clear legal guidelines. What third-party collaborations are allowed? NAA is lobbying the Justice Department to expedite business reviews of collaborative and joint-venture proposals.
• Partnerships should embrace standards and be based on open agreements and open systems. For example, to work effectively with Journalism Online LLC, Google Checkout or other vendors, news organizations need ways to easily operate with both and avoid being locked in. A clear set of standards is needed to govern interaction among systems.
• Competition among news organizations and antitrust concerns make partnerships difficult - but not impossible. Very few joint ventures have worked, but some do. For example, Career Builder has worked for its partner companies. Learn from the successful ventures.
• The industry needs to change, and it would be easier to do so collectively rather than as individual entities.

ADVERTISING
• One of the biggest assets is the ability of news organizations to exert local sales pressure, and this is valuable to possible partners, like the Yahoo Consortium.
• There are opportunities to consolidate distributed ad networks and for multimedia sales forces. Work still needs to be done to leverage and gain efficiencies.

CONTENT CREATION
• Know whom to license to and from. It's a question of which verticals to partner with. For example, licensing with Open Table to provide online restaurant reservations from your site. Know what they need, what your core competency is, where you might have contiguous audiences. To increase local engagement, you can create "white label" brands in reaching out to different audiences, like tourists, members of the local fine arts community, gardeners, etc. You have a local audience, how can you leverage it and local content to further embrace this strength?
• Data that news organizations routinely collect could be packaged as added value and licensed to others.
• Move beyond the role of being a distributor of prepackaged, preprinted products so that we engage in merchandizing that is more timely and dynamic and based on real-time smart data. For example, we have the ability to make retailer inventory more actionable by connecting consumers with specific offers on items that are overstocked locally.

TECHNOLOGY
We call on the news industry to create a non-profit technical laboratory with advanced research capabilities to tackle challenges like ad fulfillment, order processing, content management systems, applications and other technologies that are unique to the news and information business. For technology innovation, the news industry's fate currently is dependent on the likes of Google and Microsoft, and it will become even further dependent without this in-house technology expertise. News lags behind other media, where this concept is firmly established. For example:
• Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs), founded in 1988 by cable operating companies as a non-profit research and development consortium that pursues new cable telecommunications technologies and helps cable operators integrate those advancements into their business objectives.
• MovieLabs, founded by the six major motion picture studios, which united to invest in accelerating the development of technologies essential to the distribution and use of consumer media.

COMMUNITY/CONSUMERS
• Leverage unique relationships with local niche communities.
• Partner with consumer-facing entities and local businesses to develop the products and services that will further this engagement. For example, all are working with Facebook to extend their community. We have the social graph, but nobody "owns" the community graph yet.
• We cannot lose the community.

DISTRIBUTION
• Take advantage of a multiplatform strategy that includes other media: set-top boxes, mobile, X-box, iPhone, direct marketing, broadband, etc. There is growth beyond the Web in cable broadband and out-of-home technology. The world is a lot more complicated and there is a lot more opportunity.
• Locality and mobile platforms are already fused together, but we are still in the early stages. (Think of the early days of online banking, which took several years to become established.) There are opportunities for news organizations to distribute their deep and broad local information with new partners. For example, the location-based social network Foursquare allows users to check out restaurants and meet friends. Is there a possibility to partner with Foursquare to deliver local news?
• The role of distribution is changing, as is the role of The Associated Press to facilitate distribution of content. Is that value still meaningful? Can the news cooperative reinvent itself? Who is licensing local content to Google if AP is not doing this? Explore other sharing agreements.
• Consolidate the local Web.
• Can local scale? There are numerous local providers, and access to local content is fragmented as a result. We can envision a world where there are 1,500 newspaper iPhone applications - or one universal app for local content.

HOW CAN LOCAL WIN?
• Consolidation will occur across national and local media. The more the industry works together, in content aggregation and building audience, the more negotiating power it will have.

Group members: Randy Bennett of Newspaper Association of America, Josh Cohen of Google News, Ryan Davis of Philadelphia Media Holdings, Jeff Light of The Orange County Register, Jim Pitkow of Attributor Corp., Steve Simpson of Gannett Co. Inc.