Few newspapers have had more experience with multimedia advertising sales and a "converged" sales force structure than the Tampa Tribune. Ms Hall provided lessons on training and hiring, package selling, and the challenges involved in media convergence.

The Florida Communications Group, of which the Tribune is a part, has restructured its sales department to cross-sell all its products -- newspaper, television, web and Hispanic publications, both print and digital.

Quite simply, a multimedia portfolio is stronger than any one medium alone.

"Cross media selling will help advertisers sell more products," says Ms Hall. "Evidence indicates that a minimum of three exposures to the ad in a seven-day period is the minimum required to produce a positive return on investment."

Not surprisingly, hiring good people and training them is key to the strategy, and perhaps the most difficult. Among other things, sales reps are sent to "media boot camp" for an intensive education into the company’s various media properties. Ms Hall provided many such details of the process, and also outlined the challenges to cross-media selling.

Print/Web integration: Pay attention to what can go wrong

A lot of attention is being paid to the print and web newsroom integration at the New York Times, one of the world’s most successful newspaper web sites.

Mr Chase presented ten steps that led to one newsroom. But he also warned about what can go wrong. And since failure is often more illuminating that success, here are the things to watch out for:

 Current leaders want to remain leaders, so involve them. "There are leaders in the newsroom who built the news gathering organization we have. So it is important to involve them, not go around them."

 When you invite ideas, handle bad ones carefully. "You want to encourage people to try new things."

 Good ideas are sometimes ignored.

 Don’t lose the entrepreneurial spirit that makes stand-alone sites great.

What leads to success? Among other things, Mr Chase had this to say:

 Don’t assign -- invite journalists to contribute. "The reporters who work for the New York Times, and for most newspapers, are hired becaue they are good at doing one thing. But they’re also very smart people, and they like to experiment and play with things. So we invite them to participate."

Re-imagining The future

Newspapers companies are constantly developing new products and solutions for the digital age, but the rapid pace of change requires that they first develop an innovative culture,, says Mr Frame.

At The Globe and Mail, 225 staff, working in cross-department teams, took part in idea generation and business case development. They considered such questions as:

 How do we become an integrated news gathering organization?

 What is a newspaper about in the digital world?

 How do we tell stories on the web?`

 How do we organize ourselves?

The new ideas process, dubbed "Reimagination", resulted in the proposal and assessment of 160 ideas, or which 18 projects went to the feasibility stage. Twelve of them are being implemented, with three related to web-paper integration.

"Integration is more than simply moving desks. It’s about changing mindsets," says Mr Frame. "Newsrooms and journalists already recognise that on-line is becoming increasingly important -- the shift is not as radical as it would have been five years ago.

"I dearly, dearly want to belong"

It is one thing to know what is cool, but it quite another to know why something is cool.

Dr Rohde, whose company sends teams of "cool hunters" around the world to seek out what is cool and why, uses the information to help companies make their products and services more appealing to consumers. For newspaper companies on-line, the trends make blogging a particularly good application to reach younger people, he said.

Dr Rohde’s presentation decrypted why some things are "cool" for what he called "Generation Search" or "The Computer Game Generation", the 16- to 26-year-olds. He defined what he termed "soft spots" that leads young people to seek out certain products and services.

The three most important "soft spots" are:

 The desire to belong. "Because these children are children of a culture of divorce," he says. "It leaves them rather emotionally vulnerable. They dearly, dearly want to belong."

 The extended home concept. "’Home’ isn’t where my bed stands, because that can be a lonely place. Home is where your friends are."

 Feeling connected. "Connecting people is the ultimate soft spot of this generation," he says. "Any company, any brand, any product that helps them get connected, is great for them."

These ’soft spots’ and others make blogging particularly attractive to young people, he says. "I’m always astonished at how people want to throw away their privacy and put in on the internet. But they want to say, ’hello, this is me, this is my life.’"

All for one, one for all

French regional newspapers are among the most aggressive in protecting unauthorized use of their content, and they’ve got good reason for doing so: they have banded together to provide a variety of services, for a market that others were trying to capture, using the newspapers very own content.

"The objective is to continue to control the distribution of our content," says Mr Farny.

Taken individually, France’s 61 regional dailies cover relatively small slices of the country. But taken together, they provide 100 percent territorial coverage for 18 million daily readers through 5,000 reporters and 25,000 local correspondents.

Much of that content has "added value" that can be exploited through syndication services by the newspapers themselves, says Mr Farny.

Through the regional association SPQR, the newspapers have banded together to offer several services to take advantage of specialized markets.

For example, its web-based service, France Actu Régions, is a cuttings service that electronically and automatically provides businesses with a selection of 22,000 articles a day -- a service that is forecast to generate 2 million euros in turnover in 2007 in a market that previously was dominated by illegal scans and distribution of newspaper content.

Mr Farny described other services, all based on the same concept -- regional newspapers working together are finding new ways to exploit their digital content.

Steps to online classified success

When it comes to classified advertising, would you rather be an established publisher or a pure on-line player?

Mr Stanley says he’s rather be a publisher since they have advantages that online players don’t -- brand strength, customer relationships, bigger sales teams, territorial coverage, promotional power and more.

Mr Stanley, whose company provides classified web sites and support to the UK publishing industry, examined the common characteristics of successful publishers and offered 10 steps to online classified success. Here are a few of them:

 Fresh thinking. "The main task here is to adapt the thinking to your role as providing solutions for advertisers and consumers, rather than thinking it is about force-feeding them print advertising with a few add-ons."

 Improve the sales approach. "To be successful in the future you need to expand your customer base beyond those that advertise in your newspapers. I doubt that the average newspaper carries more than 30 percent of the jobs that need filling in their markets, less than 20 percent of the homes for sale at any one time, and less than 40 percent of the cars that are for sale. What are you doing to carry the rest?"

 Do not be a control freak. "It is the DNA of publishers to control things, but trying to do the technology yourselves will slow things down and limit how far you can go."

Going local

"Advertising, particularly local advertising, is undergoing the most dramatic change in its history," says Ms Bowler.

Technology is changing the way people shop. Commercial search is exploding. "Publisher strategies should provide more choice for consumers and advertisers," she says. "It’s all about providing new and flexible models for advertisers in order to meet these changes."

The key words here are "publisher strategies", says Ms Bowler, because publishers need to join the pure-play companies in exploiting search and transaction opportunities available online.

And they need to do it now, says Ms Hall, quoting Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying that local advertising is going to be "a huge business" for the company.

To succeed with local advertising, Ms Hall said publishers need to extend themselves along the "paths to purchase" that consumers take. Traditional media are big on creating need and awareness, but it is the search engines, directories and classified players that are providing the opportunities for consumers to research and select their choices, contact the seller and ultimately make their purchase. "Our advertising is not just about creating interest, it’s about handling the customer and bringing them to the point of sale. And that’s added value for the advertiser."

Local advertising provides the best opportunity for publishers, says Ms Bowler, whose company provides search engine and marketing technology to on-line publications. It is the world where they can beat the mega-search engines at their own game.

Small audiences, big results

Although newspapers are generally thought to be a mass medium, Mr Pacheco says the future will be different.

"Fragmentation is driving change," he says. "With information overload, you can no longer reach everyone with one product or platform."

The Californian formed a "new products group" in 2004 consisting of a small number of "visionaries and evangelists" in the company to develop niche products to increase market share of consumers and advertising in Bakersfield, a growing city of 330,000.

The company now has nine sites, ranging from neighborhood news to social networking to youth to ethnic sites and more. They have increased web traffic 20 percent to 30 percent for the company.

"Our new challenge is to offer a little bit of everything for everyone, but in many places," says Mr Pacheco. "At the Californian, we’ve found that niche community web sites are one way to do that."

The future for BBC Interactive

More citizen journalism and more videos are at the heart of the future direction of BBC News Interactive, according to the sneak peak provided by Mr Clifton of where the service is headed.

"Our readers want more control and they want to be more involved," says Mr Clifton.

BBC News Interactive, begun nine years ago, attracts four million unique visitors per day. It has what is perhaps a unique arrangement for one of the world’s most widely consulted news sites -- its funding is guaranteed by a mandatory licensing fee in the UK.

Here are two of the recent developments described by Mr Clifton:

 More space to promote audio and video content. "You only have to look around to see news organizations ramping up to do this," he says. "Some say we had been focused on text-based pages too long. I’m not in the camp that believes video will conquer all. Text beats video 20 to 1 each day. The trick is how text and video can work well together, rather than one dominating."

 More citizen journalism and better use of user-generated materials. Mr Clifton said he is pushing for a "consistent message" on how to use this material across the BBC, and there will be better systems for uploading videos.

Mr Clifton described other initiatives and also expressed dismay at the slow pace of convergence with other BBC departments. He said convergence was imperative in the near future.