Am Back! Let's just jump in with New Ad Models

I am in Washington D.C. at the 2008 Online News Association's annual conference listening to a panel on optimizing and monetizing news sites. The panelists are collectively calling for completely new ad models that are based on the audience, rather than the page views and content.

Online ad sales are way down this year so far, according to the panel manned by Joe Apprendi, the CEO of Collective Media, Ken Doctor, a News Industry Analyst of Outsell, Mark Rose, the director for Sales Strategy at the Tribune Company, and Bob Benz, a partner at Maroon Ventures:

• The entire industry in first half of 2008 is at $38 billion in rev. and that is the lowest it's been at since 1996.
• Ad reps need to cut the cord from traditional legacy ad models.
• Instead, they should be looking at INTERACTIVE ad sales and AUDIENCE-CENTRIC SALE as well as newsroom partnerships and niche content (as opposed to "commodity content," which I am guessing is basic breaking news material).
  
• Also, the newsroom should get over itself AND the Wall, and start looking at ad staff as allies rather than enemies.
  
• Finally, specialized, niche packages that so many newspapers are doing on the web these days are two-three clicks deep from home pages, and tend to be forgotten by ad reps. New ad models need to "monetize" those opportunities. Such opps can give ad revenue an "8 time lift in performance" compared to general news.
  

So have we now destroyed the Wall in order to save journalism? Seems kind of ironic.