Afterward, Grimshaw spoke to Andrews in a separate Q&A about the end of print, HTML5, Windows 8 and social sharing.

Watch the full video of the session, embedded below:

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick’s advicefor the media industry: think about producing “information” — not “content.”

Why? “Content is very much about the package, very much about the container”, Borthwick said during a Q&A with GigaOM founder Om Malik at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

The moment you start thinking about it as information, I think people start thinking about it differently, they think less about the container and the structure and a little bit more about the users.

That’s especially important as the concept of “container” changes with the increase in realtime data and sharing across platforms.

The pair also talked about how to use that data (Betaworks has started both Bitly and Chartbeat); how Facebook isn’t making the best use of its data for advertising and the need to break the CPM ad model; why Apple’s app store and Google Play don’t work; and a lot more packed into the embedded video below:

“You have unbelievably scaled b2c platforms like Facebook, Google etc. And unless you want them to tell you exactly what your business is worth, you have to have your own direct connection with consumers.”

Miller talked about Hulu, the company’s digital tabloid The Daily, News Corp. in China and more during a Q&A with paidContent Editor Staci D. Kramer at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

Miller, former CEO of AOL, also had some thoughts about the future of his friend and former business partner Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO of Yahoo — and what it will take for the companies to survive. Full video
embedded below:

Politics used to be a very controlled and almost theatrical process, with politicians and other political actors appearing in carefully scripted events — and the reporting and analysis of those events was also restricted to certain specific media channels: a couple of TV networks, one or two major newspapers, and so on. Now that we have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media, how has that changed the nature of both the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012 in New York recently, I asked Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and NBC News digital head Vivian Schiller for their perspective on that question and you can hear their answers in the video embedded below.

Marshall, the editor and publisher of the ground-breaking political blog network, said that social media has really just accelerated the process of breaking down those traditional barriers — a process that started with the arrival of blogs about a decade ago:

I see it as a progression over the past dozen or so years, of a more and more frictionless news cycle, and what we’re today calling social media has just accelerated that. The other major transformation is an increase in key vectors in the news — the way the New York Times used to be a dominant vector in how news was propagated, along with the big TV networks and other big metropolitan dailies. With the growth of blogs and the beginnings of social media, you have a more fluid and unstable ecosystem of news.

Schiller, who was previously CEO at National Public Radio before joining NBC’s news division, said that for a media entity like NBC, social media has a way of amplifying the stories that come up in other formats. For three weeks in a row, she said, comments that politicians — including Cory Booker, Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden — made on the TV program Meet The Press became a national story thanks to the power of social media. “Meet The Press is about as old media as you can get,” said Schiller. “But those events ricocheted around the world — that’s social media.”

Both the panelists also said that one of the positive things about social media and its role in the news and political ecosystem is that some events that are trivial or unworthy of attention can “burn out” more quickly when they are exposed to the glare of Twitter and the blogosphere, whereas they might have taken on a life of their own and dominated the discussion in newspapers or on TV networks before social media. And Schiller said despite the fact that Twitter and other forms of social media can be filled with a lot of worthless noise, overall the impact has been positive for both politics and the media as a whole:

Of course there’s a lot of garbage in social media, but there’s a lot of garbage in every form of media, from the beginning of time. But I think that all of the kinds of access and the ways people can interact with content, for politics, it’s all good.

“If you buy a digital book you should be able to read it on anything you want to read it on.”

Learn more from the full Q&A embedded below:

Here’s the full 22-minute video:

By the way, Russo and another daughter Kate are appearing at Greenlight Monday night to promotoe their print-only collaboration Interventions.

Follow more of our book publishing coverage by Laura Hazard Owen during BookExpo America this week and beyond on Twitter @laurahazardowen and here.

Update: Just after this went live, Amazon announced the acquisition of Avalon Books. The owner’s reasons for selling to the e-tailer show a very different view.

A couple of highlights from the interview:

Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.

And from the avid photographer who goes by @photomatt in his social media life:

One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface. WordPress, it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR … but that doesn’t work on a phone.

Here’s the full 20-minute video:

And here’s Mullenweg’s take.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

“We’re excited to see a lot of the tablet manufacturers truly recognise that marketing their tablets toward video games, robots and all of that is not necessarily the best way to scale,” Schimel said.

Meredith has worked with Pinterest to find a big traffic boost to some of its magazines, Schimel says.

Watch the video above for more. Or read about the paidContent 2012 panel in which Schimel joined Barnes & Noble - digital newsstand and emerging content GM Jonathan Shar and Adobe’s digital publishing group business development director Nick Bogaty.

“Right now, we’re at a very exciting point. We’re only just short of the time when digital subscriptions will overtake print circulation.”

The FT has 285,000 digital subscribers and a 305,685 average daily circulation (ABC, April 2012). It looks like the paper could reach the cross-over early in 2013.

Last week, I wrote how News International’s The Times may be set for the same milestone not long later. Each is seeing print circulation decline (down 18 percent in a year at FT) but digital custom grow (up 32 percent at FT).

A crossover would show that each can migrate readers to digital and yet still have an actual business to show for it.

Read more about my panel discussion with Grimshaw and Piano Media’s Tomas Bella at paidContent 2012.

Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson has a pretty hot hand when it comes to investing in the social web, with stakes in leaders such as Twitter and Tumblr, but he hasn’t put money into anything that looks like a media company for some time. In an interview backstage following our chat at the recent paidContent 2012 conference in New York, I asked Wilson why that is, and he said it comes down to a number of factors: one is a lack of familiarity with the media business, but the other is a concern that traditional media companies don’t scale well — particularly when compared to user-generated content such as Twitter.

Wilson explained that in a previous incarnation as a venture capitalist, with the firm Flatiron Partners, he invested in a number of media-related startups, including financial analyst Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com, but those investments didn’t go well. It’s not that they failed, he said, but they just didn’t become the kind of blockbuster that makes a venture investment worthwhile for a large fund. Meanwhile, his investment in Geocities turned into a home run after the company was acquired by Yahoo for $3.6 billion:

So it was one of those things where this worked and this didn’t, so I want to do more of this and less of this. I think we were just out of our sweet spot — I’m not suggesting media is a bad place to invest, I just don’t think we knew what we were getting ourselves into

Wilson said that Union Square took one crack at something approaching the traditional media or content business by investing in Outside.in, which aggregated local data from a variety of sources. “We took a shot at the hyperlocal content business through a blog-aggregation model with Outside.in and that didn’t scale very well,” he said. “I think that hyperlocal media model is still one that has not been cracked.” Outside.in was ultimately acquired by AOL last year and folded into its Patch.com hyperlocal effort, which has also gotten a lot of criticism from investors and analysts for being a high-cost operation.

So where is the future of media? Wilson said he thinks it lies in working with emerging platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle and crowdfunding efforts such as Kickstarter — entities that are working on a different model that connects consumers directly with the producers of the content they want. Wilson said that if he was an editor with a publishing company who was good at finding and developing young writers, “maybe instead of working for a publishing house, I go and set up shop on top of the Amazon market or the Apple market or both.”

I don’t think the idea is that the editorial function or the venture capital function or the journalist function doesn’t happen any more, we just have to do them in the new place that they should be done, the more efficient place that they should be done.

Embedded below is a video of the on-stage interview I did with Wilson, in which he discussed the tech industry’s response to SOPA and PIPA — and how he believes that content owners have a public duty to provide access to their content in a variety of ways, because society helps enforce the copyright that they hold over that content.