Let's look at the locals from Trinity Mirror Group...
They sell lots of papers.

Run lots of websites with cross-syndicated content.

Group Revenue: £763.3 million.
Digital Revenue: £35.6 million.
Where the Digital Revenue Comes From
Verticals work best in locals:

Recruitment
Property

Display adverts seem to be best in nationals:

The stuff we know well

Under pressure from specialist sites, advertising networks, advertising measurability.
The National Story
National TG media (The Mirror, etc) digital revenues have declined from 2008 to 2009 from £5.6m to £4.8m

Audience Reach growing 78% year on year with 9 million uniques per month.

Can anybody see the problem here?

Where does WP fit in this?
Reduced costs
Fast deployment - make new sites, quickly
Writer productivity
Wide range of off-the-shelf functionality
Inherently community driving software
Extendable towards social networking (eg, BuddyPress)
All the power you need to create a full-blown highly trafficked website
Everything client gets is GPL = no licensing complexity
Advice Time
Lose the Fear
Put full content into RSS feeds (with different ads)
Do not cloak URLs, use nofollow with care
Use serendipitous tools
Consider Paywalls for certain content
Vertical Markets - webinars, etc
Use Social Media Connectors
Consider discussion possibilities
Examples of great WP use in big media...
Aggregate - look at Gawker Networks
Some Plugins
David Coveney
@davecoveney

http://www.interconnectit.com
In Big Media
What is big media really?
Liverpool Echo - 100,000 sales per day
Manchester Evening News - 81,000 sales, 100,000 freebies per day
Birmingham Evening Mail - 67,000 sales per day
Dailies
Independent - 200,000
Daily Mail - 2,000,000
The Sun - 3,000,000

Complex Groups
Informa - £1.2b - £150m profits
Telegraph Media Group - £50m profits



WordPress
Gravity Forms
Role Scoper
Akismet/WP Spam Free/Bad Behaviour
Easy scalability
What's Missing?
Workflow
WP Supercache / W3C Cache
Disqus/Facebook/Twitter and their APIs
Don't forget BuddyPress!
Something for Analytics
Spectacu.la Page Widget Plugin
Spectacu.la Advanced Search
Spectacu.la Discussion
Open Auth - eg JanRain RPX Plugin