Pony Express riders carried letters and parcels in a mochila 147 years ago. Today, Mochila is an online content portal. Keith McAllister, Mochila’s chief executive officer, talks about the challenge of creating more content while reducing costs.

What are some of the issues facing newspapers in regards to content management?

The fundamental challenges of the newspaper industry are well known. In the online world, newspapers lose their traditional advantage of being a platform monopoly and now must compete against an enormous range of publishers, large and small, and with content of all types, including text, photos and video.

On the acquisition side, the question for newspapers is how to efficiently acquire content for their online businesses that engages their users and drives page views. Most newsrooms are facing the paradox of having to create more content and reduce costs at the same time. 

On the distribution side, newspapers must find ways to get their high-quality content in front of as big an audience as possible. That distribution should achieve branding, traffic generation, and the creation of additional revenue.

We believe the traditional subscription-licensing model offers limited value. The traditional licensing model is limited because it requires human beings to negotiate one-off deals. We believe there’s a great need for a technology-based solution that allows both control and scale.

How has content management changed over the past few years?

We are seeing a trend toward respect for copyright. When consumers first started to turn to the Internet for news and entertainment, the boundaries were undefined. Today, copyright infringement issues have become more pronounced and there is a definite need in the market for the organized exchange of rights-managed text, video and photo content. I think you are starting to see that the traditional content licensing and online syndication model is evolving so that publishers of all sizes — from long-tail bloggers to large newspaper companies — play by the same rules.

In what ways does content management help to increase revenue for media companies?

There are two pieces to the revenue puzzle that can be solved by joining a media marketplace. First, newspapers can leverage their digital assets by licensing them to online publishers for a set fee. This is the preferred method of syndication for established sites that have a large sales staff that can command high advertising CPMs.

Second, newspapers can increase revenue by syndicating their content in an ad-supported model. This method allows smaller publishers who can’t afford syndication fees but are willing to share ad revenue as payment to syndicate.

Newspapers can also further monetize the ad-supported content by including related links that drive a new audience back to their main site where they can provide ad page views.

What Web 2.0 trends do you believe newspapers should pay attention to?

Users are increasingly engaging with content on a growing number of formats, including on mobile phones and iPods. It’s important to develop strategies to drive content to these formats and support experimentation.

One of the largest Web 2.0 trends today is the implementation of widget technology. Publishers can utilize widgets, which we call content badges, to get packages of customized content to integrate into their Web sites.

We believe that newspapers have everything to gain from adopting Web 2.0 technologies, allowing them to broaden the distribution of their content, grow their brand, enhance the user experience, and ultimately, provide a more sustainable online business model.