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This morning, I attended the Gotham Media Ventures Future of News session. The discussion was admirably casual and forthright. They also did a good job of bringing the audience into it — especially for a non-blogging event. I am pleased I went, but a couple of things struck me that are worth sharing.

First, calling it the “Future” of anything is problematic. Scanning the room, I markedly was younger than the median age. I’m 40. That’s a problem. Much of the discussion was about building Internet news revenue and there were very few new customers in the room, and none who spoke up.

Image via CrunchBase

Second, the main argument was, “You can’t just republish newspaper stories on your web site and expect to scale a business.” That’s true but incredibly understated. SEO, visitor retention, and repeat visit strategies are critical but they are purely linear business improvements. The actual advice needs to be, “Like all the dominant web business, building a distribution network is the only way to win financially.” No one touched on the concept, thought the NYT’s new web services (managed by Mashery, of course) are clearly a step in this direction.

Network businesses scale better than linearly, as long as the businesses that remember to build both the sexy and the boring parts. The sexy part displays information on other web sites, etc., creating distribution for content and brand. The boring part gathers user and audience data everywhere the content and publisher brand are distributed. Managing and using all the data collected by boring part is probably the hardest part of running a network, but it makes all the money. I don’t think any of the traditional media in the room understood that.