I  just got back from 5 days in Los Angeles, where I was a lead facilitator and coach for the Knight-McCormick Leadership Excellence Institute. For 3 1/2 days, I sat in nice hotel rooms with very smart people talking about how to create change in organizations, how to develop business plans and revenue models that can keep organizations profitable (and staff paid), how to rethink audience as something closer to community--and how to make money beyond selling advertising.The goal of the program is to support long-term transformation of media organizations by supporting news leaders,  but the lessons learned apply to so many news sites--and news entreprenurs--that I wanted to share some of them.

1. Traffic really matters, and you need ways to measure it.

One of the critical measures for an advertising network--someone who will sell ads for you--is how many unique visitors and how many page views you have every month.  You will make an ad network very happy and make meaningful money if you have 1 million visitors a month, but most sites like Oakland Local have far less (we are doing about 175,000 page views a month, 72,000 unique visitors.)
What is most important is that you can get some independent account of the traffic--Compete.com, Quantcast and Alexa all offer ways to measure.

2. Knowing who your audience is and standing for something also matters to sell ads

If you can provide data about who your audience is--who you reach--you can sell ads even if your unique visitors are closer to 15,000 per month (see afrobella.com for proof of that). Advertisers will want to be associated with your brand and reach your audience--you just have to educate them to believe that, not always an easy task.

3, Ads aren't enough to keep you going, you need other schemes

One of the big topics discussed at the KDMC event this week was how to diversify your revenue streams. That can mean holding profitable events (New West), offering additional ad services to advertisers (Sacramento Press), having a donor campaign (Minn Post), or selling merchandise. For people from traditional news outlets, the idea of multiple ways to make money can be challenging; for East Bay entrepreneurs, it's how we go, always, right?

4, Collaboration is king

Spot.us, the new program that helps crowd-fund stories, got big props from many attendees of the KDMC program for providing a way to fund-raise for stories and multimedia, but some people in the program talked about going beyond that and collaborating on writing and publishing stories with local or regional partners.  This is a model OL has done a lot of, and it's worked really well.

5. Audience engagement is everything

Not everything is about big numbers.  Knowing who your community is, bringing them into the conversation, publishing their work, shaping coverage in response to their needs--these are things many Oakland-area web sites are skilled at , but that are new concepts for bigger, more main-stream publishers now fighting to stay relevant.

6. It takes a network, so have one

One of the old-school ideas that got killed at this seminar is the one that goes: My whole goal is to get people to come to MY website, and only my web site. This is the belief that says a site should have its own social network, its own version of Facebook, it's own photo galleries, etc.  This is the belief that in this day and age is just plain wrong. Far better, we learned, is to partner with other sites and trade traffic back and forth via links, shared ads, etc.  After all, you are never going to get your audience to just visit your web site, so why even try?

7. Don't ignore mobile

Many people at the KDMC event admitted they've been so focused on their web sites (or their print products) that they haven't paid attention to mobile phones and how essential they are. Basically, when you think about the future of computing, it's all phones and small devices people carry around. And when you think about the world today, lots more people have Internet-enabled phones than computers. This is true in Oakland, and its' true everywhere.

So, every web site, at the very least, should have a version that can display on a mobile phone.  If your site is WordPress or Drupal, you can implement a simple plug-in. However, also remember that people won't want to read a long story on their phone--think about headline versions for cell-phone readers.

8. Being a leader both means having vision and building a team

For many of the leaders attending the KDMC seminar, two of their big issues were setting a strategy for the future and then hiring talented people to help them execute it.  Not only can none of these folks go it alone, but their biggest need was to find, retain, and manage talent. For us less funded-folks, I'd say this translates into treating people as well as you possibly can, including paying them promptly.

9. No one has all the answers so do what feels right

Could anyone have predicted Wikileaks becoming a news sensation? Well, it is. In this day and age, rules are made to be broken. Do it your way, why not?

10. Passion is key

One of the phrases Leadership Institute seminar participants used over and over was passionate, a term no media executive would have used 5 years ago. Passionate means a) you really care and b) you REALLY care and are engaged and present. One media exec described it as "We are in the community with you, audience--and we care, along with you."  That sounded like a pretty good way to describe it to me--what do you think?

I left these sessions excited about the folks I will be coaching over the next six months but also energized about all the learning going on.  There's an archive of materials from the KDMC event that will be live--and free on the web (see http://bit.ly/9Nldbc) in a day or so when presos are posted). Also, there's an archive of my presentations from past KDMC programs  that can be viewed & downloaded that I didn't realize existed till last night. 

All these sessions have a lot of useful material, all free. If anyone operating a web site in Oakland wants to get together and talk about any or all of these lessons, I'd be happy to meet up or organize a gathering.