On Wednesday I attended the “Media 2010 Summit” presented by the Albany Times Union. It featured a panel discussion with three of the TU bloggers and Greg Dahlmann, co-founder of popular local blog All Over Albany.

It took a while to get to some meat in the discussion, and it felt like time ran out just as we arrived there. The Times Union runs about 155 blogs on its site. A handful of those are written by TU staffers; the rest by unpaid volunteers from the community. Topics range from food to politics to dogs to parenting to religion.

I was most interested in hearing about how the TU is (or plans to) turning their stable of blogs into a revenue source for the paper — and what its plans are for more tightly integrating the news content on their site with blogs and being able to package and sell ads against all of their content.

We didn’t quite get there.

Panelist Kristi Gustafson, who writes the fashion/lifestyle blog for the TU, talked about “feeding the print product” and how they’re constantly trying to use blog content to drive people to the print newspaper. She repackages some of her most popular blog posts and features from the week for the Sunday print edition of the Times Union. To me, this seems backwards, as people continue to consume more content online and less in print.

The topic of “The Wall” (the traditional partition between editorial and advertising) came up, and Steve Barnes, a senior writer at the TU and author of its popular food/restaurant blog, made one of the more interesting statements of the night:

The revenue aspect completely not my concern. I build a brand because I know it brings more readers to the TU. I have no idea what they charge for ads. I don’t want to know. We have a department for that. We have people who go out and sell ads.

Steve is an “old-school journalist” with a great respect for editorial and journalistic integrity (and I respect him for that). But his statement is a bit contradictory. He wants to use his blog to bring readers to the TU, but doesn’t want to take the full step to equate those readers with dollars and that what he writes impacts that. In the Web world, readers = traffic. Traffic = ad revenue. I don’t believe it’s as decoupled as Steve thinks.

Journalists in the future, like it or not, are going to need to understand media business models better. While I’m certainly not suggesting that advertisers should directly impact content (be it “traditional” news content or blogs), driving traffic is what drives revenue (and let’s not get into that other Wall, the pay wall).

Journalists and editors need to figure out how to make the content/traffic/revenue marriage work. It may mean that journalists DO need to think about the revenue side of the house when writing. The Huffington Post does real-time A/B testing of headlines in the first few minutes a story is live and then makes a decision on the most effective one.

I certainly don’t want to see all news content devolve into keyword-optimized nonsense, but we can’t pretend that media companies can exist without revenue to support them. Consumers have so far shown that they’re unwilling to pay for news online. Advertising is, and always have been, what funds the editorial side of the house. I don’t think that one side of the house can afford to ignore the other.

I’ve been noodling on this since the event on Wednesday. Let me know what you think in the comments.