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Hyper-personalized news streams, hyper-targeted ads. A fund to finance journalism start ups. A digital peer-to-peer journalist reputation system. Broadband Internet connection for everybody.

These were some of the ideas presented this week in the Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS) in Aspen, Colorado organized by the Aspen Institute. The conference focused primarily on discussing the business models for journalism as the news industry seems to be completely confused how to find a new sustainable path in the changed news ecology.

High level representatives from the traditional newspaper industry, nonprofits producing journalism, new players in news like Google and Mozilla, start ups, and venture capitalists tried to find sense in the confusion.

The combination ended up being a gathering of a variety of perspectives to journalism and its future. From one perspective, newspaper printed on paper has a prosperous future. For example Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group and the chairman of the board of directors of The Associated Press, said that business model can keep on being “charging for the printed word printed on a paper”.

From this reality comes also Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher and the co-founder of Journalism Online LLC. He even sees possibilities for raising the prices for the print product if the news sites start charging for the content online.

But Jeff Jarvis, the associate professor in City University of New York, thinks that we are entering post print era. He presented a model for new news economy, based on hyperlocal blogs supported by advertising. And for Cynthia Typaldos, a founder of news pay system Kachingle, news is something that the readers can be persuaded to pay for voluntarily.

For Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, journalistic process involves also other contributors than professional journalists. Also, she sees the role of the news is not so much anymore to “tell people stuff, but to facilitate conversation.”

Along the same lines goes Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego, a non profit that provides local news service. For him, journalism and news are only a part of the institution, which has a mission to educate people. We are not looking for eyeballs for our website, but we want to focus on service and impact on the community, he said.

Apart from different perspectives for journalism production, the participants came from a variety of consumption habits, Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of The State and former journalist, said that she reads every day several printed newspapers, with well-known brands, like the New York Times. At the other end of the consumption spectrum was a 26-year-old Jacob Colker, a co-founder of the Extraordinaries, a system for crowdsourcing on mobile. He rarely goes to newspapers websites but gets his news from his peers for example on Twitter.

Looking into the plethora of perspectives, it wasn’t surprising that the group didn’t find consensus which way to go in business models at this point in the evolution. But maybe there is not a need for consensus. News organizations can experiment several ways and thus find new, viable models suitable for their needs. If you want a good overview about different models, look at journalist Steve Outing’s presentation about the topic.

But does the industry have courage to do experiments? “There is a short-term market failure of courage”, Esther Dyson, the chairman of EDventure Holdings, described the state of the journalism industry. Is she right?

Yes, there is a lack of courage in experimenting new business models especially inside the traditional media. The discussion at the conference reflected that, too: the focus lingered around the notion whether the old subscription model could be applied at least partly to web publishing. One example of that is the freemium model, where the readers pay to get access to some of the content, but most of the content stays free at least in the beginning.

Why isn’t the legacy media trying out any new pay models? For example micropayments or donations to find out how many of the readers are willing to support good content?

One reason may be that the media industry is used to high profits. Donations feel like a nickel to them, and it might feel humiliating to rely on donations after making a lot of money for a long time. Beyond that, as Sue Gardner of Wikimedia pointed out, the corporations are often not suited for developing innovations. The organizations might not be so eager to try innovations either, especially when they come outside of the organization.

Thus it wasn’t surprising that the most interesting idea was brought up by Marissa Mayer, the VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google. She came up with and idea of a hyper-targeted news stream, that could be done for example by Google, Twitter or Facebook.

Nevertheless, Dyson’s observation about the lack of courage doesn’t capture the whole picture. There is a lot of courage in the journalism scene. New models or old models modified to this era are being experimented. For example, technology blogs in Silicon Valley are experimenting with their event and sponsorship economies, so is non profit investigative reporting like ProPublica, and community funded reporting initiatives like Spot.us.

But courage is needed at this time. Newspapers need courage to look into where society and technology is going, not focus on reinventing news organizations. Venture capitalists need courage to invest in journalism start ups. Non profits need courage to experiment.

And, the most importantly, all the players need courage to look into readers, contributors, citizens, users – however you call them – to find out what do they value in journalism and what they are willing to pay for.

Because, at the end, the solution can also look as simple as it is for venture capitalist Fred Drasner, who saw the situation from the VC’s point of view: “We have to figure out what the consumers want, make the product and sell it.”

The post was first published on Spot.us blog, a journalism experiment for community funded reporting.