The Californian is an independently owned paper, a status that more papers are beginning to envy because of the lack of corporate pressures for large profits. The paper’s publisher is able to look at the big picture, the long view, instead of being concerned by quarterly and yearly revenues.

For innovation purposes, the Californian started a New Products Group in early 2004. Pacheco sees the newspaper as increasingly complex and wonders how most companies are still thinking old school. It’s time to move into new markets. As an example, he used the increasingly popular virtual world, Second Life, where users create avatars and interact with other users. He showed a digital kiosk in Second Life which when he started had only one paper. Now it has eight. Most are produced by individual reporters telling stories about the latest occurrences in the growing Second Life community. But Reuters has just embedded a reporter in the alternative world and more traditional news organizations could follow suit.

But what’s really important to the Californian is “maintaining and growing audience at the local level.” To do this, the paper offers a little bit of everything for everybody:

• It started with Northwest Voice.com, a group of websites and publications targeted at people in the region’s growing suburban areas. Citizens are invited to contribute.
• Bakotopia.com was launched to capture the 18-35 market. Launched in January 2005, the site took citizen journalism and combined it with social networking. An example of how the site is used is local bands which post their music and concert dates on the site instead of posting announcements on telephone poles around town. The paper also sends reporters to local events to take pictures of people around town to be printed in the paper and posted on the website. Pacheco looks at the site as a kind of local MySpace.
• The paper also spun off Mas, a weekly magazine targeted at English-speaking hispancis. 
• For those moving into town, the Californian launched a Newcomers Network. Users can use profiles and a friends feature to meet others who share the same interests.
• After these other experiments, the paper focused on its flagship. It mixed in blogs and began interacting with the community. Citizen produced blogs helped the paper to cover things that its regular staff wasn’t getting to.
  

Now that the paper has spent the past two years on audience growth, it is ready to begin focusing on growing revenue. Little by little, the site is beginning to introduce new features that will bring in some money.

“What (new media in newspapers) is really all about,” closed Pacheco, “is about people and how they use our tools to express themselves in new ways. They’re doing it through sites we control as compared to sites controlled by other companies trying to take our business.”

Also, check out some video clips from the conference grâce à Robb Montgomery and Visual Editors (here and here).