ONA Unconference

The unconference is an opportunity for those attending ONA17, Oct. 5-7 in Washington, D.C., to add conversations you feel are important to the official schedule. During Conference sessions on Thursday, October 5, and Friday, October 6, use the "Vote" link below to pick which five pitches attendees will see on Saturday, October 7!

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Unconference Presenters Announced

The votes have been counted and the sessions are set! Your ONA17 Unconference sessions are:

Engaging your audience with audience engagement: Beyond the buzzword with The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Emerson Washington 1 | 10:00 AM | Saturday 7 October

Who cares what people will read? What will they pay for? with the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Ken Sands Washington 2 | 10:00 AM | Saturday 7 October

SEO meets journalism: Google News terms, fundamentals you need to know with Trisolute News Dashboard’s Tobias Fellner-Jost and Chelsey Heath Maryland C | 4:00 PM | Saturday 7 October

Investigating corruption and organized crime with open data with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Giannina Segnini Washington 5 | 4:00 PM | Saturday 7 October

Pivoting to Video - Why and how? with Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Kat Duncan Washington 1 | 4:00 PM | Saturday 7 October

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Voting is now open for ONA17 Unconference!

The pitches are in for ONA17 Unconference ... what'd we miss?? Vote for the pitches you think are most interesting and important HERE!

Read the full descriptions in the posts below and vote for up to five sessions. You can only vote once, but are very much encouraged to rally your friends and colleagues around your favorite ideas and the sessions that you think everyone should see!

The top five vote getters will get an hour each to explore their Unconference concepts on Saturday, October 7.

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Pitches are now closed for ONA17 Unconference

Watch this space and make your voice heard: Voting opens HERE Thursday, October 5th

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Many thanks to the ONA17 Unconference Sponsor Medium 

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Are ambitious User Generated Content projects possible?

Everyone’s had a big UGC idea, and everyone knows UGC projects are hard to execute. 

Reddit is full of pre-viral UGC content. In April, we did a collaborative experiment that involved an online canvas of 1 million pixel squares that redditors could edit by changing the color of a single pixel from a 16-color palette. Over 1 million users participated in over 72 hours. The experiment (reddit.com/r/place) tapped into the complications and incredible coordination that happens when online communities work together. 

Newsrooms are particularly equipped to develop meaningful UGC projects and online communities want to be heard by newsrooms. Let’s brainstorm new and big ideas together, share experiences and get feedback on an idea you’ve been developing. Anna Kim, Reddit Head of News & Journalism, will lead the discussion.

Anna Kim, Head of News & Journalism at Reddit, works closely with newsrooms to develop strategies for discovering pre-viral content and engaging with new audiences.

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Engaging your audience with audience engagement: Beyond the buzzword

The term "engagement" is perhaps the most overused and misused concept in digital journalism. I have heard it used to describe numerous metrics, concepts, job titles, even entire departments in the newsroom. It’s a buzzword, but a buzzword with meaning if you look at it the right way.

In this session we will discuss the five *actual* ways that people engage with content — consuming, saving/following, searching, sharing and commenting— and how leading news organizations from all mediums optimize for them.

At the end of this session, the audience will understand what is behind the buzzword, with ideas for how to consciously optimize their products to drive engagement on all levels and develop a loyal audience. Greg Emerson, Mobile Product Manager - Android, The Wall Street Journal, will lead the discussion.

Greg Emerson is a journalist first, but with mobile and product development experience that gives him an extensive toolkit to shape compelling digital experiences for news. As the mobile product manager for the Wall Street Journal, he is at the intersection of product and editorial, coordinating with editors and mobile developers to deliver improvements to the Journal's flagship mobile apps and to find new and compelling ways to feature our journalism on mobile devices. 

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Trump, Kardashian and a Panda: An Insider’s View on Social Video

Video is one of the most powerful ways for newsrooms and publications of all kinds to reach audiences whose attention is increasingly spread across devices and platforms. But, all of those platforms have their own recipe for what works and what doesn’t. In this workshop, social video expert and Wochit SVP Drew Berkowitz will help attendees understand how to make video that will gain the most traction on the most popular platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. From ideal lengths to whether you should go vertical, horizontal or square, Drew will bring clarity to the confusing landscape and and provide valuable insights on the elements that will ensure you’re winning the social video game. Drew Berkowitz, Wochit SVP, will lead the discussion.      

Drew currently serves as Senior Vice President at Wochit, leading efforts to help guide publishers, journalists, brands and storytellers elevate their content by creating custom Video. 

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Prototyping for the "M" generation: the "GEDI Visual Lab experience"

Try to explain how Snapchat works to an adult, then give your smartphone to your 7 yo daughter and let her play. How can media connect with the digital born Minecraft generation? How can we think, design and produce content that fits in their seamless tech user experience? Which kind of solutions can we imagine to drive our 2040 audience, while our stakeholders are still their parents? That's one of the challenges for our Visual Lab, a team of developers, designers and journalists who are trying to hack the newsroom at Gruppo Editoriale GEDI - publisher of several newspapers and magazines in Italy, included "La Repubblica", "L'Espresso", "La Stampa". One of our works, "Francesco Totti king of Rome", is among OJA finalists. We'd like to give you a "behind the scenes" glimpse on our work. Andrea Iannuzzi, managing editor with GEDI Visual Lab, will lead the discussion.

My name's Andrea Iannuzzi, father of two kids, aspiring "unicorn" in the media landscape, in search of more time to go sailing in the seven seas. I'm the managing editor of the Visual Lab at GEDI - ok, you can pronounce it like the Jedi knights - Editorial Group. I've been around in journalism for the last 30 years, so I'm a survivor of the digital revolution.

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SEO meets journalism: Google News terms, fundamentals you need to know

We all want to make sure our work gets out to the biggest number of online readers possible. After producing quality articles, landing pages, videos, images, graphics, interactives, podcasts and more, the question becomes: How do you cut through the noise and find engaged readers? 

Search engines are one of the classic referrers of web traffic to a news website. You know that, but do you still cringe when people mention SEO? Do you know a SERP from Google News Box? Publisher Carousel from AMP? How about your website’s search visibility? 

We explain each Google News ranking type in plain terms, how and when articles can be indexed and ranked, and how publishers can optimize their pages to get a wider search audience, using some examples from the Trisolute News Dashboard SEO tool. Tobias Fellner-Jost, Trisolute News Dashboard news SEO strategist, will lead the discussion.

Tobias Fellner-Jost is founder and inventor of Trisolute News Dashboard, which uses real-time data to help online news websites achieve greater visibility in Google News. Tobias holds a Master's degree in computer science and is focused on data science; before founding the News Dashboard in 2013, he worked for more than 10 years in the media industry as an online strategy and technology consultant.

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What 4 big AMP changes this year mean for your news SEO strategy

In the world of the Google search, Accelerated Mobile Pages – aka AMP – are the gold standard for news publishers, according to the web giant itself. 

 Many of the news websites that perform well in Google News search visibility employ AMP. We looked at AMP and its impact on news-related search engine results page rankings and news publishers in January, May and July 2017 - using hard data from the Trisolute News Dashboard search visibility tool and our background in SEO and journalism. The U.S., Germany, the UK, France, Canada and Australia are the basis for this study, giving us a global view. 

We reveal the four biggest changes to AMP in that time, and what they mean for online news publishers. Chelsey Heath, Trisolute News Dashboard news SEO strategist, will lead the discussion.

Chelsey Heath is the news SEO strategist for the Trisolute News Dashboard, which uses real-time data to help online news websites achieve greater visibility in Google News; and was previously a content editor, digital producer, SEO champion and copy editor at the Arizona Republic/azcentral.com in Phoenix.

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How might we communicate article credibility to readers and platforms?

What if third parties could mark up articles based on a standard set of indicators and use that to inform platforms and AI initiatives? What are the key indicators of credibility that matter most? What technical strategies can we use to ensure these indicators make an impact on our information ecosystems? We would like to host an interactive session with journalists, technologists, editors and others to answer these questions. We focus on the technical and operational definition of a standardized set of indicators that can be used to facilitate third party markup of information on the internet, starting with articles. We are a diverse, interdisciplinary community committed to building better standards for credibility on the web and improving information ecosystems and media literacy. An Xiao Mina, representing the Credibility Indicators Working Group, will lead the discussion.

An Xiao Mina represents the Credibility Indicators Working Group, started by Meedan and Hacks/Hackers and incubated at MisinfoCon, which aims to address this challenge by convening journalists, data scientists, designers, librarians, platform representatives and others; she serves as Director of Product at Meedan, is a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and is a former visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

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The Future of the Notification

I may love the push notification more than anyone and have probably sent more of them than anyone. Notifications have been around for 8 years & we've only scratched the surface in what is possible with these highly engaging micro-moments. Notifications began in mobile & are being adapted across digital channels (TV, Web, Email, SMS, Home, Cars, Apple News, Digital Wallets, IOT, & proprietary content distribution systems). Notifications are getting much more engaging & sophisticated as they are starting to be powered by AI/ML. This talk will offer a glimpse into the future of the notification. Mike Herrick, SVP of Product & Engineering at Urban Airship, will lead the discussion.

Mike Herrick is the SVP of Product & Engineering at Urban Airship and is responsible for Urban Airship’s products. He joined the company in 2010. Urban Airship sends over 2B notifications every day for online news organizations.

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Making Every Day a Slow News Day: Net Neutrality and Local News

Net Neutrality is the principle that broadband providers like Comcast and AT&T shouldn’t pick winners on the internet by throttling /blocking sites or adding paid fast lanes that favor deep-pocketed sites. 

For 20+ years, the U.S. internet ecosystem thrived under net neutrality principles. Now FCC chairman Ajit Pai wants to dismantle them. He's rumored to be releasing his plan on Oct. 6, right in the middle of ONA. The loss of 2015’s brightline net neutrality rules could cause immense harm to  local news and startups. 

What will happen to publications that can’t afford a fast lane and load slower on mobile devices? 

What happens if an ISP blocks news sites based on the content of their reporting? 

What can publications do to protect a vibrant, diverse online news ecosystem?

Ryan Singel, Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, will lead the discussion.

Ryan Singel is a Media and Strategy Fellow at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. Singel is the CEO and co-founder of Contextly, an engagement platform for publishers. Prior to that, Singel worked at Wired for 10 years, covering privacy, security, tech policy and net neutrality. None of CIS's net neutrality work is funded by corporate contributions.

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Investigating corruption and organized crime with open data

Are you still complaining about the lack of data to investigate corruption and organized crime? This session will show you all the amazing treasures you can find digging into international databases available online. Every commodity and commercial transaction in this world, from shoes to military weapons to ivory or chemical products can be tracked using online data, sometimes even in real time. Giannna Segnini, Director of the Science Journalism Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, will lead the discussion.

Giannna Segnini is the Director of the Science Journalism Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She was a collaborator on the award-winning Panama Papers and was the head of the investigative team at La Nacion in Costa Rica. Their investigations has led to prosecution of more than 50 politicians, businessmen and public servants in Costa Rica, UK, USA, France and Finland. Two former presidents in Costa Rica were convicted for corruption. Segnini has been training journalists all over Latin America and USA in computer assisted reporting for years. She's a well know speaker at conferences all around the world and has received several international prizes for her work.

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Who cares what people will read? What will they pay for?

At its core, journalism has always been about quality. But the advertiser-supported model confused the very idea of quality to mean quantity of readers. We've learned it's usually the case that stories that go "viral" on the web are not stories that people would be willing to pay for. It's actually a much higher bar, and a much more difficult task than you might imagine, to truly learn what people are willing to pay for, vs. what they're merely willing to read. If you want to learn more about the kind of journalism you need to produce to move from an advertising-centric model to a subscriber-centric model, then this session is for you. If you'd like to talk about the possibilities of high-value subscriptions, or even membership models, then this session also is for you. Ken Sands, deputy publisher at the Chronicle of Higher Education,  will lead the discussion.

Ken Sands, deputy publisher, Chronicle of Higher Education, was formerly a top editor at Bloomberg, Congressional Quarterly, and The Spokesman-Review.

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Stop Wearing Pants, Be a Freelancer

Freelancing is much more than weird hours, unlimited vacation (ha!) or lounging around in pjs (although that is a perk). We’ll clear up some common misconceptions, discuss the psychological toll of sporadic paychecks, examine the importance of well-placed pitches, tackle nitty gritty record-keeping and talk about what it’s really like to work from home. Nothing is off the table, so bring all your questions, and expert freelancer Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato will answer them!

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato is an MJ Bear Fellow, science aficionado and Antarctica traveler. She freelances for National Geographic, NPR, The Atlantic, etc. Mollie loves em dashes, '80s music y la selva. Twitter: @mbloudoff

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Pivoting to Video - Why and How?

I have worked in newsrooms across the country training reporters and photographers in video. I've seen what works, what doesn't and how we can improve our newsroom video methods so that we can produce video that is useful to our readers without sacrificing our photo or written content. I've love to speak with other ONA attendees about their experiences and my hard earned lessons from years of producing and teaching videos in newsrooms from a small 30 person staff in southern Texas to the larger metro newsroom at the San Francisco Chronicle. Reynolds Journalism Institute Senior Video Editor Kat Duncan will lead the discussion.

Kat Duncan, Senior Video Editor at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, is a video editor, producer and visual journalist.