It's been a busy week in New York, and we're not talking about the ram-attack in Times Square.

Ahead of the INMA World Congress, which opens at the TimesCenter with Brainsnacks on Sunday and the conference itself on Monday, delegates have been busy with study tours and social events.

INMA's Dawn McMullan reports that more than 50 news media executives from 14 countries visited a total of 21 media publishers and vendor partners on two study tours through Manhattan on Thursday and Friday.

The 'blue tour' focussed on content, audience and revenues, visiting the New York Times, Google, Dow Jones, Lotame, Chartbeat, Nativo, Bloomberg, WNYC Studios, ProPublica, and Playbuzz. Australian Robert Whitehead led the 'red tour' which visited or heard from Facebook, Condé Nast, NBC Universal, Hearst, Parse.ly, HuffPost, PageFair, MediaMath, Piano, Advance, and Thomson Reuters.

INMA has video highlights here.

At Dow Jones, chief innovation officer Edward Roussel reported "two tectonic shifts" - from print to digital, and from a fundamentally advertising model to a fundamentally subscription model. "More than half of Wall Street Journal revenues are subscriptions as opposed to advertising," he said. "That's a big shift. Ten years ago, most big newspaper groups -- certainly in America -- were probably getting 70 to 80 per cent of revenue from advertising.

"We're managing that transition, away from print-first to digital-first, away from an advertising-based revenue model. It has made our strategy simpler. Our goal is to provide news services and projects that people are willing to pay for. That makes us far more focused on the user experience."

Trevor Kaufman, chief executive of Piano - a software platform that runs audience-revenue programmes for publishers including AOL, The Economist, Gannett, Hearst, McClatchy, NBC Universal, and Time - says potential audiences have become harder to find: "It used to be that a reader would intentionally pick up or go to a product. Now, a reader might click on a friend's Twitter link and end up on a website reading a story with no real idea the site or source," he said.

But most traditional media companies are not really focused on hard-core consumer marketing. Kaufman said a contact of his at the New York Times said the top indicator of whether a reader will become a subscriber is the number of times they visit your website, "but when have you ever been to a website that asks you to come back? It's somehow uncool to engage the users. That's what's got to change."

Dawn McMullan INMA, Peter Coleman

Pictured: Guests at the private President's Reception at the Plunge rooftop bar of the Gansevoort Hotel in New York's Meatpacking District enjoyed a standout view

Above: Guests from India join INMA executive director Earl Wilkinson