By the end of yesterday’s New Business Models for News Conference at CUNY’s J-School, one thing was overwhelmingly clear: Bloggers want to get their content on major media sites and major media sites want this content.  Yet, according to these two groups, there remains a big problem: How to do it?  Upon hearing this, we at Outside.in felt great because Outside.in for Publishers delivers a solution to this problem.  Let me elaborate.

The so-called Reverse Panel, a rather clever idea on the part of Jeff Jarvis put this issue in relief.  Jeff put 6 forward-thinking “Big Players” (Jim Willse of the Star-Ledger, Jim Schachter of the NY Times, Jennifer Carroll of Gannett, Goli Sheikholeslami of the Washington Post, Jim Brady of Politico, and John Paton of ImpreMedia) at the table and asked the room full of bloggers, small publishers, and tech start-ups to tell the Big Players what we would like them to do.  What do we need from them?  What could they do to make our jobs easier?

The bloggers said, “We want you to give us visibility and traffic.  When we scoop a story that you like, we want you to put it on your site and give us the credit.”  The publishers agreed, saying they want the content, and in fact, they went so far as to claim, more than once, that without taking advantage of the great journalism happening on blogs, their businesses will fail.  Everyone agreed on this point.  The stumbling block was around the How.  How do the publishers surface the blogger content on their site in a fair, respectful, and mutually beneficial way?  What does that relationship look like?

That’s exactly what we’re working on. With Outside.in for Publishers, we’ve built a platform that enables publishers to display headlines, links, and summaries of blogger content on their sites.  It generates hyperlocal ad inventory for publishers and gives traffic and visibility to bloggers. Essentially, we’re making this relationship easy.  OIP is automated yet full of opportunities for customization.  Publishers can choose the sources from which they get content.  If they’re really picky, they can even select the stories that come from those trusted sources.  The editor becomes a curator of the blogosphere; the tools are in their hands.

Many publishers have already begun their work with Outside.in for Publishers, yet of the panel members, only the New Jersey division of Gannett (represented by Jennifer Carroll) has taken advantage of the service.  So, to you others I pose an honest question: if you know you need to leverage the blogosphere, what’s holding you back from using Outside.in for Publishers?  Every day we’re improving our platform.  I encourage you tell us exactly what you need so that we can help you hurdle the stumbling block of the How.