5pm update: The Irish Times reveals the secret of how to get readers to pay for online content
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11am: Guardian Media Group chief executive Carolyn McCall has seen the digital future - and it is one where star computer programmers will be as important to the Guardian as star journalists.
"We need to realise that our star developers are as important to our future as some of our star journalists," Ms McCall told the World Newspaper Association's first World Digital Publishing Conference & Expo in London today.
"If I had said that three years ago it would have been regarded as heresy in the newspaper world but it is true.
"We need to be as good at managing software development as we are at managing printing distribution and circulation."
Ms McCall said there was no shortage of ideas around at the moment, but delivery was everything - and that made the work of programmes vital.
The Guardian launched two new Web 2.0 websites, Been There, where travel tips are exchanged and the blogging site Comment Is Free.
Ms McCall said the two sites were risks that paid off and she warned media companies to not ignore the long-term view of investing in digital products in favour of the day to day battle with competitors.
Media companies that failed to get the internet right now would find it much harder and more expensive to do so in the future.
"I think that media brands without active communities will not be real brands at all - they will simply be content providers fuelling search engines and aggregators."
The Guardian's podcasts, covering a range of topics including science, arts, media, sport and news had about 150,000 downloads a week and the numbers were growing, she said.
She identified three fundamental changes in media that newspaper companies had to deal with.
1. Newspapers can now offer audio and video to readers via their websites.
2. Traditional geographic limits no longer apply as the internet crosses borders.
3. Passive audiences are now engaged communities.
"We are at a critical moment in our history and we should all expect to be judged by how we rise to the digital challenge. It's quite a responsibility," Ms McCall said.
"It's not just about the future of our businesses, but also about the future of quality journalism.
"Now and in the future, in print and on the web, with words, pictures, audio and video we want to deliver trusted journalism that informs and makes a positive contribution to society."
12.20 update: Don't miss the gorilla in the room, is the advice of Bob Benz, the general manager and vice president interactive of Scripps Publishing which publishes the Naples Daily News in Florida, the United States.
He proves how easy this is to do by showing video footage of a group of basketballers in white and black kit passing a basketball to each other.
Fish asked the audience of media executives at the World Digital Publishing Conference and Expo to count the number of times that players in white passed the ball to each other.
So intent was the audience in counting the passes that only five noticed that a man in a gorilla suit appear on screen and beat his chest.
The laughter of those caught out was palpable, the analogy apt.
Fish said that we were all passing basketballs and missing the gorilla by running newspapers and filling our heads with the day to day issues of circulation, sales, marketing.
And the risk of all this was that we would continue to miss the gorilla. Benz admitted that he had been kept awake at night trying to work out what the gorilla was, at the same time as keeping all the balls in the air in running his newspaper business.
But Scripps had some good ideas, a $1.5m ideas fund for new ideas to roll out online. In the advertising sphere his company has tried to take on Google and Yahoo! by taking advantage of something that they can't - localism. The company has set up websites to cater to local businesses that want to harness internet advertising focussed around local centres.
Most impressively, the Naples Daily News, which serves an area that has no local TV station, has created its own evening news bulletin in vodcast form that can be watched on iPod or on a Sony PlayStationPortable. The vodcast, Studio 55, is also now broadcast on a cable channel. The broadcast is professional and slick, something that British newspapers, with largely amateurish podcast and vodcast efforts, would do well to take note of.
2.15pm update: Could the Tesco Clubcard work for newspapers? The Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese mega-newspaper that sells 12m copies a day - and that isn't a typographic error - found that their own version of a customer loyalty programme certainly did.
They do things differently in Japan. The Asahi Shimbun has a morning circulation of 8m and an afternoon circulation of 4m, in a country of 127 million people. Japan has 49m households and a newspaper subscription rate of 107%. That's right, a completely saturated market, only made possible by a massive home delivery effort that Britain threw into the too hard basket years ago.
On average Japanese readers spend just 11 minutes a day reading their daily newspaper. New media had taken time from newspapers and revenue from it.
The Asahi Shimbun needed to entice the youth market to buy it to replace aging readers. It's initially strategy was to turn to the mobile phone.
Takashi Ishioka, from the paper's digital business project team, told the World Digital Publishing Conference that the paper took advantage of a new potential target audience by focussing on twin loves of the Japanese - sport and mobile phones.
Asahi Shimbun launched a news and sport service for mobile phones, with a lot of effort invested in real time sport reporting. It became popular with youth, to the extent that Asahi's mobile phone news service now has 1m subscribers.
The paper maximised its revenue by inviting readers to subscribe to the print edition via mobile phones. 21,000 did so, a new market for the print edition that the paper didn't know that it had.
But the company needed more, which is where the clubcard popped up, or as the Asahi called it, the Aspara club.
In October 2004 the paper launched the Aspara club. The membership organisation was structured into three categories to reward loyalty: green, yellow and white. Green card members had subscribed for more than one year and accounted for 85% of members.
The Aspara club offered its members reward points for answering questionnaires and attending events. Accumulating points resulted in readers winning prize tickets for sporting events. The paper also launched a mobile phone service and offered readers discounts on financial services such as credit cards, collecting revenue as each member took up the offer.
The Aspara club has 1m members that the Asahi Shimbun has generated extra revenue and loyalty out of. They plan to do more in the future.
5pm update:The Irish Times reveals the secret of how to get readers to pay for online content
Una O'Hare, the general manager of its website Ireland.com, has prompted many questions and much debate at the World Digital Publishers Conference.
Well into the coffee break a group of half a dozen people were still huddled around Ms O'Hare, attempting to divine her secrets.
Only a handful of newspaper sites dare charge their readers.
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are two papers that do for premium content.
Aftonbladet, a news website in Sweden, is another. It launched a paid for website Weight Club, in 2003 and it was reportedly profitable after two months. Now it has 190,000 subscribers paying beween $20 to $40 a month for tips about losing weight and the idea is licenced to other European papers. Aftonbladet Plus a premium subscription service that launched last year, has more than 40,000 subscribers.
Ireland.com, website of the Irish Times, has 50,000 subscribers, not bad for a country of 4 million people and 45% home internet penetration. Broadband runs at 32%.
On the question of making internet pay, Ms O'Hare says: "The answer from Ireland.com is absolutely yes."
Traffic to the site is up 250% since service launched and levels competitive with rivals including state broadcasters RTE.
"It's all in the balance between free and paid content," says Ms O'Hare.
Her main point was the it is difficult to launch a subscription service without a pre-existing online presence.
The Irish Times had this since 1994, when it became the first newspaper in Ireland and the UK to launch on the web.
In 1999 it rebranded as Ireland.com and in 2002 launched its premium subscription service, prompted by a financial crisis at its parent company. It used its 118,000 registered users for its email service as a starting point.
And they launched even after 90% of users told them that they would not pay for premium content. And they left very little free to view.
Traffic plunged, from 25m page impressions pre subscription to 6.5m page impressions.
But the site grew traffic, offering sites about travel, genealogy, dating, health, and by digitising its archive, in a projecdt half paid for by the Ireland library service.
This year traffic is back up to 15m page impressions.
Subscriptions now makes up 63% of revenue, advertisng just 22%.
There are a number of points to make about all of this. Internet advertising is in a parlous state in Ireland, partly due to the poor uptake of broadband. It accounts of a tiny percentage of overall adspend in Eire, and is at much higher levels in other countries.
And after four years, the website is not yet profit-making, but nearly at break-even. And it gets all its content from the Irish Times for free.
How many other newspapers would be as brave as the Irish Times to make its online readers pay. We all know that the answer is very few.
One final point. After putting most of its content behind a subscription firewall, circulation of the print edition of the Irish Times increased by more than 3%.
