One of the fundamental rules of the Carnival of Journalism group-blogging exercise founded by David Cohn is “no apologies” for anything when blogging.
In that spirit I won’t apologize, or offer excuses, but I hope Dave will allow me to at least feel a little guilty for going three weeks between posts.
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One of these years I need to make it to the annual Online News Association conference. A sizable number of good friends were there — judging by their tweets — and I’m sure it would have been extremely interesting and valuable. (Though I certainly would not have wanted to endure what many conference-goers did with all of the airport hassles in Chicago.)
Fortunately, as with many conferences these days, so much coverage is posted online, both in real time through social media and after the fact, that it’s possible to get a good sense of what I missed. An especially valuable resource in this regard is the ONA Student Newsroom, where student journalists from various universities working with professionals and educators as mentors cover the conference with text, images, video, and other tools.
I haven’t pored through all of the available coverage, but one of the key sessions seems to have been Amy Webb’s on tech trends. Looking through the list of bullet points, there are a few things I recognize from Webb’s presentation at the 2014 JI Conference in Maryland last April. But she has a reputation for not giving the same presentation twice — probably because she knows how much of an overlap there is between these conferences that draw similar audiences — so I am looking forward to going through her slides for some insights.
And the rest of the stories by the student newsroom — there appear to be at least 75 of them on a WordPress powered site — should keep me busy reading for a while, too.
Emergent Journalism 