The New York Times’s senior vice president Martin Nisenholtz yesterday delivered a keynote speech on the Future of Publishing at Wharton School of Business. I wish I had been there, as I now read the transcript at paidContent.org.

Nisenholtz spoke at length about the need to find the same type of engagement for the online media product as the traditional news paper. As NYT is about to raise their famous pay-wall, the speech was especially interesting;

“… in a very direct sense, greater engagement contributes to our emerging business model. This approach is governed by a simple premise: the more engaged our users are with us, the more value we deliver to them, the more likely they will be to pay.”

Nisenholtz went on by mentioning Twitter, Foursquare and especially Facebook as keys to that kind of engagement, and from what I understand we can expect a future nytimes.com where these social tools are an integral part of motivating readers to pay for NYT online.

“To be sure, users sharing expertise is not new” … “Where I think The Times can differentiate here is in the quality of the answers, and more generally, the conversation. The secret to that is real identity. And for the first time, thanks to Facebook, we have such a system at scale.”

An interesting development, as it in turn would open up for others to more easily adopt and develop the NYT model without having to focus too much on the technological difficulties of buying or programming expensive content management systems built from scratch.

He finishes the speech;

“… we’re about to take an incredibly exciting new turn at The New York Times. Literally and figuratively, this turn is not free. This is a seminal moment for our company and our industry, one that I know we will rise to, as we have so many times and in so many ways in the past.  We have an opportunity to redefine the essential relationship that we have with our users – and change the contract we have with them – from one that is loose, free and casual, to one of real emotional commitment. Engagement.”

Exciting (NY) times!

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak to one of Sweden’s most offensive and creative editors in chief, Anette Novak (Norran). Just like Nisenholtz, she is dead sure about how media has to work more with the emotional connection – that newspapers, just as before, need engagement to survive. I whole-heartedly agree, because most media consumption are frankly more about how you feel about the distributor than what facts and information they present.