I spent the past two days in Chicago (ask me about my fear of revolving doors), attending the first ever NAA Online Sales Forum. The conference included panels and presentations aimed at newspaper sales staffs and managers interested in learning more about how to sell the newspaper’s digital media offerings.  Instead of posting my notes, I wanted to share some of the top take-aways from each session....

Welcome to the Digital Edge blog! We’ve moved over here from digitaledge.org as part of the redesign of the Newspaper Association of America’s Web site. The new Web site has greatly increased search capabilities and a slew of new features.

I have a few things to point out for those interested in digital media, since things have moved around a bit with the redesign of NAA.org.

Resources and Reports
The 'resources' tab is the best way to get to all of the NAA digital media and Digital Edge content. The + sign next to Digital Media reveals subcategories like advertising/revenue, audience participation, multimedia and more. Or, click on Digital Media to go to the page with the latest digital media content.

Online Publishing Update
The Online Publishing Update archives -- two months' worth -- are under the resources tab, then click on the resource publications tab. The publications page is also where Presstime magazine and the Digital Edge (reports, Snapshots, case studies and more) live.

Online Ideas Gallery
If you're looking for best practices and innovative ideas, check out the Online Ideas Gallery (accessible from the front page of NAA.org).  The gallery includes all of the Digital Edge Award and ACME Award winners, plus Innovation in Action reports, best practices from Digital Edge and Growing Audience reports and more. The Online Gallery is open-access for now, but in the next month or so, NAA will start putting some of these things behind the membership wall.

Speaking of awards: The Digital Edge Awards, now part of the Media Innovation Awards, are open for entries! We're accepting entries showcasing the best of digital newspaper media through Oct. 26. Enter here!

Audience Building Initiatives
Our latest Audience Building Initiative report is available now over on GrowingAudience.com. The case study focuses on IndyMoms.com, a community and discussion-based Web site and monthly magazine from the Indianapolis Star. In less than six months, the site became profitable, and the loyal, engaged audience is generating a huge number of page views.

If you have questions about the new site, NAA has set up a new hotline to help you navigate the new space. The phone number is (571) 366-1155, and it's open during normal business hours (ET). Or, you can just e-mail me at beth.lawton@naa.org.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to the new NAA.org!

 - Beth Lawton (Manager, Digital Media, NAA)

This morning, I attended the Knight-Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism, produced by J-Lab at the University of Maryland. The panelists for the symposium portion, who spoke on "Unleashing Future Journalists", "Unleashing the Public", "Unleashing the Unconventional" and "Unleashing New Storytellers," were all finalists for the awards.

The Media Management Center at Northwestern recently completed a study about how teens consume news (the results will come out this fall at mediamanagementcenter.org). Lots of interesting stuff in there, but there was one specific finding that really spoke to me: One of the findings was that a lot of the teens cited their favorite places for news as Comcast. (Yes, Comcast -- as in the telephone/cable company).

Your newspaper's digital media site(s) should not be a node, it should be a network hub. That was the central message of a presentation this morning at Medill at Northwestern University during the Media Management Center conference, "Our Digital Future."

Like many newspaper journalists, I was initially trained in print and in writing and editing neatly put-together set of related items. The idea of the package translated over into online, with the ubiquitous "related links" and more. But newspapers haven't necessarily trained readers to expect "packages" online.

Many people have some sort of advertising blindness when surfing the Web – unnoticed banner ads, unread Google AdWords. Of course, online advertisers are working hard to make ads more noticeable and effective without annoying potential customers in the process.   It turns out the customers are fighting back....