Richard Livesey © 2009 ipTVe

I attended a Gotham Media Ventures conference on January 15th at the Harvard Club in New York City. The theme for the conference was The Future of News & Information with the goal to "Examine how entrepreneurs in new media are creating effective and profitable models in order to reach consumers directly and how traditional media companies are attempting to adapt to changing times. The Future of News will look at the successes, challenges, failures and changes in a field where the rules are changing daily."

The comments of most note we those of Tom Bettag, former Executive Producer, Ted Koppel Unit, Discovery; ABC News "Nightline who inspired the cartoon above. To paraphrase Mr. Bettag put forth the idea that in order for a new economic model to take hold in news and entertainment it might require gathering all the old media guard in a room to shoot them.

While his comments we humorous and drew considerable laughs in the audience there is a valid point, namely that executives who control news and entertainment programming have gotten use to a high fat diet from the financial success of OTA to appreciate a leaner yet opportunistic on-line platform to fully embrace it so that consumers can slice and dice it to pick and choose what content they want to view and in what order, as they see fit.

© 2009 Pew Research Center

Currently, OTA has noting to fear from iTV with 70% still getting their news from OTA verses 40% for iTV, this according to a recent Pew Research, News Interest Index from December of 2008 However, this trending data supports the cartoon and Mr. Bettag's point, namely that the 18-29 year old demo is driving the growth in on-line sourcing for their primary news consumption.

While execution seems too severe, what is it going to take for an effective and profitable economic model to take hold for iTV news programming? Perhaps members of the former administration can oversee waterboarding...