A deal of attention has surrounded publication by the New York Times - one of the world's most-visible media businesses - of its Innovation Report last year and many of its key employees have spoken about it since.
The World News Media Congress presented the somewhat curious spectacle of the boss - company chairman and publisher of its highest-profile masthead Arthur Sulzberger Jr - parading the person whose appointment was a direct result of the report.
It's not clear whether the interview format was to control the questions asked, or to show the extent to which Sulzberger was abreast of the topic. Assistant editor Alex MacCallum was the Huffington Post's first fulltime employee - having worked as an editorial assistant at the Washington Post - and came to the Times from the legal and venture capital career she had trained for after leaving HuffPost.
But not to an editorial position: Her first role was to lead the business-side team behind the Times' cooking app, and Sulzberger says she scored another first in crossing the divide from business to the paper's news team.
Sulberger says the NYT has implemented all of the Innovation Report's "frankly modest" recommendations and gone further with focusses on analytics and newsroom strategy.
Identifying and tracking audience behaviour forms a substantial part of this, and MacCallum says being data-informed is key, "although it doesn't necessarily drive strategies".
One historic change has been abandoning the grand tradition of the 'Page One Meeting' - at which editors would spruik stories and vie for front-page positions - in favour of a strategy meeting, in which interactions are discussed alongside content. "Great from a logistics point of view," she says, "when do we think the reader will be most interested in the story; where will people be looking for that sort of news."
Sulzberger says different stories are being broken in Hong Kong and London and Paris, "and we're keeping them flowing through the day".
On storytelling, there's been "a ton of experimentation" and MacCallum says she's excited about mobile and mobile-first, with efforts to integrate video and "make this scaleable".
Detailed planning behind a report on nail salon workers has been one of the recent successes, reaching five million people after strategic work on the story including foreign language translations, an important factor with the paper's international readers accounting for almost a quarter of total audience.
The NYT Now app has also been "so successful", with lessons learned now being applied to core products, MacCallum says. NY Today is another innovation - with Washington and other versions set to launch - bringing its own lessons about headline writing for social and search: "We've learned about search," Sulzberger says somewhat ruefully.
And about platforms such as Twitter and Pinterest, it seems. Sulzberger is reserved about the 'frenemy' aspects, "but you've got to engage," he says, pointing to the 73 per cent of mobile audience which arrives from Facebook.
It's a substantial contrast to when Sulzberger joined, "and we were basically a north-east (American) paper", although he points to the appointment of a British chief executive, recruited from the BBC.
And to the classic fights among editors. But concerns - expressed by one delegate - that the focus on mobile and analytics might skew audience preference towards "fluffier" stories are apparently misplaced: "That hasn't been the case at all," says MacCallum. "Opinion, national and international news make up more than 50 per cent of what they read, and there has been enormous growth, helped by strategy and targeting.
"We're just thinking about how we bring Times journalism to a bigger audience," she says.
Peter Coleman