At last week's Digital Velocity 2009, an event billed as a lesson in how to get a return-on-investment in a digital-media economy, necessity caused ABM to invent a new event format.

And the content presented in that new format showed how far and fast social media and the Web are changing journalism and business marketing, at two very different ends of the media spectrum.

Rather than stick with the traditional event plan after it became clear that the economic crisis would limit in-person attendance to a small fraction of the crowd that filled last year’s event, ABM canceled the physical edition. But it convinced two keynoters and other panelists to go ahead and present anyway.

Keynoter John Yemma is editor of the Christian Science Monitor (CSM), as old-school a daily as you might find, but he talked about a Web-first strategy that eliminates the daily paper edition in favor of a weekly. And Peter Hahn, Bearingpoint’s interactive marketing manager, proved that branded content marketing has hit the mainstream by quoting the company’s “publish or perish” mantra.

Yemma and Hahn were broadcast via live streaming video-over-the-Web March 3, presenting to roughly 30 people in ABM’s conference room in Manhattan and nobody-knows-how-many at 49 locations that tuned in across the country.

Dragonfly, one of the event sponsors, provided the streaming. A simple teleconference provided the interactive link back to the conference room for Q&A.

The panel sessions from the conference’s original agenda will be broadcast in coming weeks, and all the video will be archived on the ABM site for on-demand viewing. All the video, cut into roughly 10-minute segments, can be seen now from ABM’s home page.

Appropriately, Yemma began his talk with an allusion to Stanford University economist Paul Romer’s famous quote, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

He talked about CSM’s plan to cease daily print publication in favor of a weekly edition, and focus the paper’s roughly three dozen journalists in eight international bureaus on breaking news for the Web site.

The weekly print edition will be reserved for in-depth analysis. Content production will be carved into three separate and self-contained operations: Web, email newsletter and print.

When technology B2B publishers tried the same production approach, however, they were stymied.

I know this first-hand because I tried it while heading up a B2B media group at CMP Media. It turned out that even top-notch print editorial managers viewed it as career suicide to be associated only with print. The publisher ended up with one integrated production team, whether optimal or not.

When asked about his staff’s reaction, Yemma said no one raised any objection.

But Yemma, who characterized CSM as “the Economist with a heart,” said the affect of the Internet on traditional media that concerns him most is the “breakup of the Fourth Estate.

“The fourth estate as an actual institution is breaking up. It’s not the power center that it was. That has tremendous implications for society, it has tremendous implications for democracy,” Yemma said.

He acknowledged the emerging role of bloggers and citizen journalists, but worried that they would not possess the resources necessary to provide the kind of checks against government, corporate and other corruption and wrongdoing that news publications have traditionally provided.

“It’s not like there is a lot we can do about it, other than cope with it, I believe,” he added. “But if you are in the fourth estate you have to figure out new ways of telling stories. And if you are in businesses that market with or use the channels in or through the fourth estate, you have to figure out a thousand new ways to deliver your messages. That’s the new world we live in.”

Bearingpoint is making do in that new media world by joining it. “I’m a marketer, and I’m a publisher,” Hahn told the group. “I publish the ideas of the 15,000 people in my company. There are a lot of marketers who think the way that I do.” In fact, if marketers haven’t started to ramp up their content engines yet, he said, then they are behind the curve.

Social media and user content are a big part of Bearingpoint’s mix, according to Hahn. The company has Facebook fans, Twitter followers and a corporate blog.

“Command-and-control media are dead,” he said. “You have to be what your audience is interested in.”

Hahn said he wants to make Bearingpoint’s Web site the place his audience of customers and prospects can go for the content that is important to them, no matter where on the Web it was originally published.

Yemma also spoke of content aggregation and user-generated content, saying that those strategies would be part of a second wave of change from CSM.

“Web-first is the first stage of the strategy. That’s still push journalism. Beyond that our next big strategic move is to develop a really robust social media strategy, so that we’re developing more of a community around this content,” he said. “We’re looking at horizontally moving across the Internet and creating a coalition of like-minded organizations.”

When I described these discussions to a B2B media veteran I know, he thought it was ironic that the “marketing guy” seemed to be further down the curve of Web media trends than the journalist.

I hadn’t even noticed; I’ve become immune, I guess, to the glacial pace at which traditional media businesses are capable of change. It’s a scary, provocative thought, but marketers seem destined to play a significant role in the journalism of the future.

During the roundtable discussion, hot topics among Yemma, Hahn and their audience of B2B executives included whether newspapers “can turn back the clock on the ‘news-is-free’ mentality,” as Yemma put it.

Debate on this topic is currently raging through the net, sparked by Walter Isaacson’s Time magazine story, “How to Save Your Newspaper.” Another was the way in which measuring reporting staff by their traffic production skews news away from “important stories” toward “the lowest common denominator.”

“On the other hand, if you have an investigative piece that you have spent a long time developing and no one is reading it, what’s the point of that?” Yemma asked.

Mike Azzara is a longtime B2B media executive covering the high-technology industry, now heading up the branded content marketing arm of Stein Rogan + Partners. He also advises media software start-up mSpoke, and tries his best to consult with media companies beginning to deal with internet affects he’s already lived through – but they insist on making the same mistakes on their own.