ONA Unconference

A program as packed as ONA’s can inspire the occasional sigh. The ONA unconference is here to fill the gaps, whether you miss a panel that wasn’t submitted in time or you have a new idea since arriving in Boston. The UNconference is a set of additional sessions created and hosted by you, the attendees. Submit your session today!

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Finishing as a runner-up in the official voting didn't deter Heather Billings and Michelle Minkoff: They held their session on Django regardless.

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Wanted: ONA UNconference Session Notes

Did you take notes at the unconference session(s) you attended? Please add them to the mix with this form and we will post a compilation on this site.

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Jim used stickers and matchboxes to drum up votes for his session on "smart ways to use dumb phones." It worked!

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You have decided!

We received more than 170 votes and now the winners have been crowned. Here are the three sessions who will be hosted tomorrow:

10:15 Embedded Content is the new Distribution Model with Art Gibson of Embed.ly

11:30 Smart ways to use dumb phones with Jim Colgan

3:30 We have a Tumblr! Now what? With Mark of Tumblr and Phoebe of Yahoo

Runners-up:

How to tango with Django

The New Newsroom: The news in real time

Thanks to all the voters and the awesome folks who submitted smart, inventive pitches. Give yourselves a hand!

Sessions will be held Saturday in the Vineyard Room on the third floor. See you there!

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The uncon team was busy plastering the ONA11 conference space with post-its promoting the voting.

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Opening a News Cafe

The quickest way to a fickle audience is through their stomach.

The Winnipeg Free Press opened Canada's first News Cafe, offering gourmet lunches, interactive town halls, and 15 kinds of beer.

It's hard to get a table most noon hours, and the free public events have drawn large crowds, to what is being described as the new social hub of the Exchange District.

John White is Deputy Editor, Online at Winnipeg Free Press, a Winnipeg Jets live-blogger and a curler in Manitoba.

Photo by Daquella Manera on Flickr

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The polls are closed! Thanks for your participation in this year's ONA UNconference selections. We are tabulating the results and will announce winners here at appx. 5 p.m.!

-The UNcon Team

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It's not the medium, it's the message

We used to tell them that it was ok, we weren't throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we were going online. We'd keep holding the principles and ethics near and dear. But, if we look at ourselves honestly, was it the Internet that killed our business, or was it the people using the Internet to send the news industry a message about they way things have been done for the past half century? When trust is our business and trust in our products is stuck in the low twentieth percentile, are we ready to look at ourselves in the mirror and say honestly and loud enough for everyone else to hear, "We've got a problem, our products are crappy and we are hurting the people we're supposed to help. And it doesn't matter if it is on paper, tv, a computer, phone or tablet -- our content isn't king, it's a pack of jokers." If we want to reverse the trend, we have to change our ways, not just change our medium.

David Johnson is a professor of multimedia journalism and film and media arts at American University's School of Communication.

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So you want to change your life?

Find out how you can actually get paid to study at Harvard University while gaining the skills and knowledge needed to excel in your career. Join us to learn how you can apply to become a Nieman Fellow and spend a year digging deep into the subjects that interest you most, sharing ideas about your work and journalism with peers from around the world and tapping into the many resources and experts at Harvard. It's the opportunity of a lifetime --- and you'll never be the same.

The Nieman Foundation is best known as home to the Nieman Fellows, a group of journalists from around the world who come to Harvard for a year of study. It is considered the most prestigious fellowship program for journalists; Nieman Fellows have collectively won 99 Pulitzer Prizes.

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Time to Check In: Using location-based services to connect with audiences

How can services like Gowalla and Foursquare help media companies connect with their audience? Can already strapped-for-time newsrooms benefit from these services? Last year, I learned about location-based services from the gurus at the National Post. A year later, I can share how our mid-sized newsroom is exploring these services' potential and offer tips on how you can get started. I hope this session can be a forum for others to share what's worked at their companies and discuss roadblocks and opportunities.

Jeff Hidek is the the Community Engagement Editor at the StarNews in Wilmington, NC, where he oversees the company's social media and community content. He's also a frequent #wjchat lurker and TV fanatic whose DVR is working overtime while he's at ONA.

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Don't Tablet Me Down!

How can journalists fully embrace the tablet revolution (and hopefully not miss another huge opportunity for their industry)? Tips, tricks, best practices and information sharing by all tablet-friendly like-minded ONA folks.

Adriano Farano is CEO of Tactilize, a startup that is building a publishing platform for tablets.

Jackson Solway is CEO of Once Magazine, an iPad-only magazine of long-form photojournalism that shares revenue with its contributors.

Photo by mikemccaffrey on Flickr

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Embedded Content is the new Distribution Model

The use of embedded content has been driven greatly by the success of Youtube. The misconception is that you can only embed videos, but with the rise of standards like oEmbed (Twitter) and Open Graph tags (Facebook), any publisher is given a chance to provide  meaningful content that can be embedded and previewed on other sites. Our job at Embedly is to provide the easiest way to get embedded videos, slideshows, images and article previews in front of an audience that may be going through their feed of shared links, tweets, or reading a blog post on another site. Along the way we have picked up tips and learned how to engage the audience using embeds. Art Gibson, developer & co-founder of Embed.ly will discuss how you're using embedded media to find new audiences or hit the longtail of users.

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The New Newsroom: News in Real Time

News events have always unfolded in real-time. But until recently, the cycle for delivering the news has been limited by the medium. A newspaper was printed once a day, maybe twice if you had an afternoon edition. With the advent of the web, multiple updates a day were suddenly possible. And now, with up-to-the-second information available about what’s happening in the world (Twitter) and what’s happening on your site (Chartbeat), the news cycle has become as real-time as the events being covered. 

Let’s get together and discuss how the nature of real-time information has changed the way you gather news, present it, and adapt it for your audience. How are you keeping up with the flow of information? What data about your site are worth paying attention to? How is your newsroom adapting to the real-time news environment?

Tony Haile and Dawn Williamson spent a combined 10 years in newsrooms and are now working at Chartbeat, where they’re dedicated to building real-time tools (like Newsbeat). They're excited to share how the newsrooms they've encountered deal with real-time data.

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University of Self-Learners: what to do after ONA11

Let's be real, j-school doesn't teach you everything. The other 362 days outside ONA Conferences, we're all still learning and consciously teaching ourselves. It's fun. It's necessary. And it's pretty darn hard sometimes. So what to do when you hit a brick wall? How do you learn on your own? What are you going to do after you get home from ONA11 and have to teach yourself everything you still don't know?

Shannon McFarland grew up self-taught. She was homeschooled, then started college at 17 to write for the student newspaper. She's not an expert, founder or a CEO of anything. She's a grad student in public affairs reporting at the University of Illinois at Springfield. And she wants to learn everything.

Photo of eager student via the Knight Foundation.

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Fair Use without Fear: Using Other People's Media without Sinking the Business Model or Getting Sued

Let's share stories about how we're facing the copyright challenge in a multi-platform era for journalism--especially in the stickier areas of music and video. We're much better at asserting our free-speech right of fair use than we know--except when we think about it! Early results from a McCormick Foundation-funded, Center for Social Media study on how journalists think about fair use and copyright in relation to free speech will trigger our discussion.

Prof. Pat Aufderheide runs the Fair Use Free Speech project at American University.

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Smart ways to use dumb phones

Last year, during New York City's massive snow storm, it was with the power of cell phones and the crowd that WNYC Radio was able to report in a thorough way and break news about the slow response by city officials.

Right now, there are no sessions at ONA about use of the device that virtually everybody has -- the mobile phone. Most cell phone users in the country, especially in rural and lower-income areas, do not have smart phones (only a third of cell phones are "smart," according to Pew) and if journalists don't find ways to innovate with regularly feature phones, then they're missing a huge swath of the population.

This is an appeal for a talk about smart ways to use phones that are otherwise dumb. A discussion about this powerful, but simple (some would say old-fashioned!) method would be helpful knowledge that other journalists could take home and would lead to more innovation in the newsroom.

Jim Colgan is Head of Mobile News at Mobile Commons and has presented at conferences in the US and Europe, including with Hacks/Hackers New York and The New York Times.

Photo by Annie Mole on Flickr

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The Chicken and Egg of Community Engagement

Trying to engage new audiences with interesting content and interactive features is like playing chicken and egg. Do you need to find that audience first? Or, will they come if you build it?

How do you engage communities when you're a start up? Or if you're a more established news entity, how do you engage new communities? What kinds of engagement efforts/projects (both online and offline) are worth the effort? How do you define success? This session could be about sharing stories and experiences around community engagement efforts. Success stories, interesting experiments, valuable learning - let's share!

Toni Tabora-Roberts, also known as Toni the Engager, is the Senior Manager of Community Engagement for EarthFix, a public media partnership of Pacific Northwest stations, where she helps citizens examine environmental issues unfolding in their own backyards.