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Early birds to the Online News Association conference got a chance to hear Lisa Williams, founder of H20Town and Placeblogger, talk about how journalism is rapidly stepping into the realm of how technology firms work, according to Danny Sanchez at Journalistopia. 

Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to attend the event, but Sanchez and the Detroit Free Press’ Joe Grimm wrote up their thoughts about it.

Sanchez mentions a few of Williams’ suggestions to newspapers for joining the digital age, which includes “focus on creating great, key features that will gain many fans, such as Twitter has done with their service.”

I’m excited to hear that someone is saying this. It sounds like to me that Williams is telling online news people to really look more outside themselves and take risks to build their brand (although, I wasn’t at the talk, so I might be a little off on this)

So what’s next for online news sites? What should journalists do to?

Says Danny Sanchez at Journalistopia:

Let’s be totally shameless and emulate the ways technology companies operate. … And, as many others have said before, let’s nurture real entrepreneurship in our news organizations backed with actual rewards.

Booyah!

Grimm points to a similar message from Williams, paraphrasing her advice as:

Expect different rewards, learn from experimentation and make the change in a succession of rapid, little steps.

 I’d still say no one has yet to figure this whole big online journalism thing out. There’s plenty of time to experiment and fail and succeed. And taking a cue from successful web technology sites and services isn’t a bad idea. Hearing stuff like this has me really excited to start the panels for this conference.