#ONAUNCON

Pitch. Vote. Unconference.

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This year’s sessions

Thank you all for voting on the 2015 unconference sessions! The lineup is:

10 a.m. in Malibu -- Staci Baird: Snapchat. WTF are we supposed to do with this?

10 a.m. in Palisades -- Aparna Mukherjee, Burt Herman, Alicia Stewart: Starting It Up: Inside + Outside Your Newsroom

11:30 a.m. in Palisades -- Bill Adair and David Caswell: Structured Journalism: Can news be as modular as Lego?

3:30 p.m. in Palisades -- Andrea Iannuzzi: La "Cronaca Italiana" Instagram project: How mainstream media handed out their social account to citizens

3:30 p.m. in Encino -- Niki Doyle: "SWEET. The boss let me dedicate an employee to analytics … now what?"

3:30 p.m. in Constellation Ballroom II -- Maureen Hoch: How many newsletters do you need?

Check back on this Tumblr site for notes on the sessions!

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“SWEET. The boss let me dedicate an employee to analytics … now what?”

Whether you have a full-time data analyst or an intern who happens to know her way around Excel, all of you ultimately face the same challenge: What the heck should I DO with this position? It’s easy to let your analyst fall into a routine of generating a bunch of boring reports — here’s how to help them go from Excel Automaton to Audience Expert. (Not a manager? No problem - this session is great for analysts, too!)

Niki Doyle is a content data analyst for Advance Digital, but she didn't start out as a number-cruncher. She got her start in newspapers at the age of 14, when she shot high school football photos on Friday nights for the local weekly newspaper. After a stint in crime reporting, Niki worked her way up to night metro editor, social media editor, AME of digital content, and, eventually, director of digital operations for the Alabama Media Group. As a director, she developed a method for measuring individual performance in the newsroom, and later used those skills to transition into a broader content analysis role.

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PITCH: Words that kill. Russian propaganda as a weapon of war at home and abroad? 

What happens when an authoritarian state with world ambitions gains control of internal media outlets, harnesses the power of modern social media, and starts broadcasting internationally, all using methods of mind control harnessed in the Cold War era?

In a nutshell, it creates a virtual reality that moves its citizens to invade a neighboring country, and the rest of the world to silently stand by. It happened to Georgia in 2008, and is now happening in Ukraine as we speak.

We will explore how Russian propaganda and blatant disinformation works, and what independent journalists should know in order to report objectively on events around Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries.

Olga Lvova, Alya Shandra, and Nino Macharashvili represent grassroots media initiatives from Ukraine and Georgia

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PITCH: Starting It Up: Inside + Outside Your Newsroom What does it take to launch a startup as a journalist? Three veterans of CNN, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and The New York Times, share tactical advice and expertise on how, ranging from newsroom projects and news brand extensions to a completely new technology platform. Alicia, Aparna, and Burt will also offer a clear sense of how three of journalism's most competitive fellowships—Harvard's Nieman, Columbia’s Knight Bagehot + Knight Stanford—helped shape their ability to pitch, launch, and execute innovation projects and startups. A can’t miss with clear examples and tip for anyone who’s considered jumping into startup world...or just toeing the water in your current newsroom role.

 Burt Herman is cofounder and CEO of Storify. He is also the founder of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists. Previously, he worked a dozen years as a journalist with The Associated Press. He was a 2008-9 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Aparna Mukherjee is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker's Currency, and serves as the Growth & Strategy Director for EconMonitor. She's worked for CNBC, Bloomberg News, the Associated Press, and The New York Times, where she launched the paper's online education platform. She was a 2004-05 Knight Bagehot Fellow in Economics at Columbia University. Alicia Stewart is a storyteller who shares true stories about identity, culture and spirit: who we are, what we do and why. A former editor at CNN.com, she has served as Senior Producer of the cable network's "In America" series. A one-time ONA conference chair, Alicia is completing her year at Harvard University as a 2014-15 Nieman Fellow.

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PITCH: The refugee crisis: how can open journalism help? The global refugee crisis has reached new levels of prominence in international media. Now many people seem motivated to help cover this important story — but how?

This session will start by reviewing a collection real-world examples and screenshots of recent "citizen powered" stories about international crisis, and then pose several questions to the audience: How can "open journalism" techniques that involve citizen journalists be put to work meaningfully and safely in a crisis? What are the opportunities when readers are motivated?  What are the risks of involving open journalism techniques in a crisis situation?

For example, new types of xenophobic "refugee memes" and visual misinformation have emerged as a backlash to the increased awareness about the issue. How can readers be solicited to help help fact-check and debunk racist imagery?

 Chris Blow is a user experience researcher and interaction designer working on international media projects with @meedan. He is a designer on the @checkdesk project or citizen fact-checking and the @speakbridge project for citizen translation. 

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PITCH: Structured Journalism: Can news be as modular as Lego?  Structured Journalism is about breaking digital news down into its most fundamental parts and pieces, and then rebuilding it into novel and exciting journalism products. It’s new, it’s powerful and it’s how more and more journalism is being done. From PolitiFact and Homicide Watch to new projects at BBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post, structured journalism promises to take journalism beyond just articles, turning news into digital networks and maybe even reinventing the economics of newsrooms. This is an informal introduction to structured journalism - what it is, how it works and how you can start doing it in your newsroom as soon as you return from ONA. We’ll cover the basics, review some examples (including the Structured Stories NYC project funded by the ONA Challenge Fund) and discuss why this approach could be so revolutionary for consumers, reporters and newsroom economics. We’ll have lots of time for questions and demos, and no technical skills are required! If you’ve wondered what structured journalism is all about, or are curious about fundamentally new ways of approaching digital news, then this session is for you. Vote for the Structured Journalism Unconference!

Bill Adair is the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. He is the creator of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009. At Duke, Bill oversees the Reporters' Lab, a faculty-student research center that focuses on fact-checking and structured journalism. The Reporters' Lab won a 2015 ONA Challenge Fund grant for Structured Stories NYC, an experiment in structured journalism. David Caswell is the founder and developer of the Structured Stories platform. He was previously a director of product management at Yahoo! Inc. and the product lead for Yahoo!’s Content Analysis Platform and Knowledge Graph.

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PITCH: Tame the Goat: Save time, money and energy with an editorial aggregation strategy and toolset  Find out how to save time, increase output, and up traffic with a strategic approach and excellent digital tools. The time it takes to author more articles, even if they are shorter, to keep in the churn of Google News, social media, and your readers' needs takes away from the time of editorial staff to work on larger, more significant, works and maintain quality. But there is a solution! We'll start the session off with a discussion of the workflow and digital tools I've used in smaller newsrooms to decrease the time spent on 'feeding the beast'. We will walk through how to approach aggregation as a subset of standard editorial workflow that increases quality and integrates with newsroom goals. We'll take a look at PressForward, an open source project I maintain, that is built to support and speed editorially-driven aggregation. We'll talk about how to provide the technical tagging to support, analyze and modify your strategy towards success. We'll also address the internet standards that support and make ethical aggregation easier. Finally, we’ll take a look at some of the internal analytics that can be performed on aggregated content to help contribute to diverse choices, mindful of your space and community. Hopefully there will be plenty of questions along the way and I'd like to hear about what problems you all have faced while increasing quantity of editorial output and discuss further possible solutions. In the past, I've worked with small newsrooms to aid in significantly increasing traffic while saving editorial time for larger projects and greater innovation. While this session would be more helpful for smaller newsrooms, I apply these principles as an individual who self-publishes and there should be useful information for larger organizations as well.

 Aram Zucker-Scharff is a Full Stack Developer for Salon.com and the Lead Developer for the PressForward, a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and run out of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He has worked with numerous news organizations as a freelance consultant, including UPI, Northern Virginia Magazine, OpenReporter, and CFO Magazine, where he was awarded FOLIO Magazine's 15 under 30 for his work on narrative content strategy. He has worked on many news site redesigns.

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PITCH: How many newsletters do you need?

Building off of the one newsletter session, I propose something that would peel off a few more questions on this important topic. This would be for editors who need to make strategic decisions about newsletters and those who write them. Many organizations are trying to reach a range of audiences - with different interests who like different types of content. We know that email newsletters are effective in reaching those audiences and that we need to fill them with good content. But if you have multiple beats and multiple content types, how many newsletters is enough newsletters? And how many is too many? Should they be run by a human or an algorithm? And finally - how do you know if something is a success?

Maureen Hoch is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. She is the former managing editor for digital news at the PBS NewsHour and former global web editor for the World Bank.

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PITCH: Finding gigs in a jobless market: Airbnb for the media industry

In today’s media market, jobs are continuing to be slashed. Most recently, we’ve seen layoffs at the Daily News, GigaOM closing and restructuring at BBC. Despite these ‘streamlined’ newsrooms, each member inefficiently covers many topics. We’ll describe how after over 150 interviews, we’ve created a global network for the media industry to help outlets do just that. This way, newsrooms can provide original coverage of the Iowa Caucus, Syrian refugee crisis and the UN Climate Change conference. And journalists can gain more independence and produce stories that interest them. Specifically, HackPack.press assists editors 1) find journalists and fixers in the field, 2) receive story ideas based on their beats, 3) expand their lists of sources, 4) manage their team and 5) hire qualified staff. 

About HackPack.press: On HackPack.press users create portfolios that are personalized for the media industry, including: professional info, beats, published stories, designated colleagues and subjective reviews by colleagues. These profiles are then searchable by location, language, role, expertise and even whether the user has a car. Based upon the profile information, members receive automatic job and event announcements, story ideas, op-eds, fixer requests and press releases. HackPack.press also expands connections to PR professionals and experts with searchable profiles to immediately diversify journalists' list of sources. They can receive additional freelance gigs and event announcements and place quote requests to which experts and PR professionals can respond. 

Justin Varilek, CEO and Founder of HackPack.press Graduated from Dartmouth College, worked as a journalist at The Moscow Times and founded Communications & PR departments in the U.S. and Russia.

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PITCH:  Building Contributor Communities for 'Torso' Content & News

Hello. I'm the founding CEO of Viki, and we've built a community of 100K+ volunteer translators who create subtitles in 200 languages for global TV series and movies. Viki now reaches 40M users per month with 'torso content' because of these passionate fans / volunteers, who bring down language barriers and build cultural bridges globally. Prior to Viki, I worked with the UN and Ashoka, and felt that a significant amount of stories and news, like global content, is also trapped behind borders. These are stories that matter, but often go unnoticed. We're exploring (ripple.news) how we can take local news global, through a community of correspondents on the ground. I would love to tell you more about the Viki model, explore parallels with news, learn from all of you on what pain points you see, and build a product with and for you. Thank you.

Razmig Hovaghimian launched Viki as a graduate school class project, and led it through its 2010 launch, its $25M in funding with the likes of Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz and the BBC, and joining the Rakuten Group of companies in late 2013. Currently server as the Executive Chairman of Viki, and Entrepreneur in Residence  and Board Observer, at Rakuten. I am also co-founder and joint patent holder of Embrace, an organization that has developed a $25 infant incubator for the developing world, and have worked with the UNDP in South Sudan and Ashoka in the US. BA in Political Economy from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Stanford University.

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PITCH: Growth Hacking Instagram

Your publication has an Instagram acccount. What now? How do you grow the account? What are some ways of getting great photos and how do you make it fun? We'll look at some best practices and tactics for growing your Instagram account and getting the most out of this social network. 

Ron Nurwisah is the Community Manager at the Huffington Post Canada. He runs the @canadagram Instagram account which finds and features the best Canadian Instagrammers.

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PITCH:  Cards Against Community

We've created a game in which people take on the role of trolls and moderators, to learn how it is to try to shape the conversation in a particular way. It mimics various moderation and troll tactics to create conversation around the interaction between systems and community.

Andrew Losowsky is the Project Lead of The Coral Project, a Mozilla/New York Times/Washington Post collaboration funded by the Knight Foundation, to create better communities around journalism. He has previously worked for News Corp, the Huffington Post, and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford.

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PITCH:  iSeeChange - How to use remote sensing data for environmental reporting

Come to our session to learn how journalists can collectively make use of remote sensing data and the public's curiosity about helping to report on climate change. (Plus, take take a walk with us outside to try it for yourself!) We’ll share what we’ve learned through developing iSeeChange — a groundbreaking environmental reporting project that combines citizen science, participatory public media, and cutting-edge satellite and sensor monitoring of environmental conditions.​ ​​We've partnered with NASA-JPL and public media stations across the U.S. to connect big data about our atmosphere to local observations and stories about weather. Right now, we're planning a HUGE re-launch of our site, the release of a mobile app, and some other exciting things on the horizon. Please join us!

Julia Kumari Drapkin is the executive producer and creator of iSeeChange and theAlmanac.org. She is a radio, television, and multimedia producer based in New Orleans with a passion for finding innovative ways to connect people to their environment and to each other.

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PITCH: 42 Seconds of News to Fight Propaganda

I want to talk about a new media outlet that will empower voices of opinion leaders as a counter-measure to propaganda in media all over the world, especially taking into consideration the informational war in Russian traditional media. The news app is supposed to be called app42 (https://goo.gl/cGj9eF) present short video news in 42 seconds, but the most interesting part is offering the possibility to citizens to comment on the news and give their opinion in up to 42 seconds together with a sentiment about this news (negative, neutral or positive). The best opinions are promoted to the top by the editorial director (promoting quality) and voted up by the public (crowd-voting). App could be launched in English/Russian. There are multiple voices in Russia that have to be empowered like this one criticizing the government live on one of the controlled TV channels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQZ19n7xXMA)

Artur Gurau is  a part of the Digital Communication Network group invited to the USA by the State Department.

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PITCH:  La "Cronaca Italiana" Instagram project: how a main stream media handed out their social account to citizens

Which is the best way to involve local communities in your information’s ecosystem? What does “engagement” really mean? Our answer is: give them your home’s keys. During the summer “Cronaca italiana”, the digital aggregation and social title of Italian national news agency AGL, brought community engagement to a totally new level: we literally gave to communities the keys to our own doors.  We intend to tell you the story of this “social first” project, and the lessons we learned from the test. We established a partnership with the “Instagramers Italia” association (aka the “Igers”) to jointly manage our Instagram account. For three months four different regional communities of “Igers” were allowed to use the password of our own account to keep a visual diary and tell the stories of their communities with images: landscapes, people, emotions. We had almost 500 pictures posted, more than 13,000 likes, and our newly opened Instagram account acquired seven times the initial followers. All without any need to edit or moderate the “Igers” posts. It’s been a successful experiment in “social first”. We didn’t want to just “open the door” to our readers, we wanted to make them responsible for a project, bring them on our side of things. We are a network of city and regional newspapers and “Igers” are already structured in the same way, with local chapters of their association – which makes us and them part of the same environment. And it worked: people took it very seriously, they discussed in their chats and groups before choosing to post one picture or another. And they always posted regularly, with no needs of being pushed by the newsroom’s staff. This could be a solid base for other collaborations and projects, online and offline (ie live events, exhibitions), but also the first step towards a membership program. Do you wanna know more about it? Vote “La Cronaca Italiana Instragram project” for ONA15 Unconference. 

Andrea Iannuzzi: Editor in chief, AGL, Gruppo Editoriale Espresso. Former deputy Editor, Repubblica Sera. Social media addicted, digital explorer, wannabe sailor (if I had time)

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PITCH:  California Code Rush 3

Hacks, hackers and newbies of all ages! Step right up and help the California Civic Data Coalition master California's jumbled, dirty and difficult campaign cash database. Newbies will make their first open-source code commits and learn how to use GitHub and collaborate with our programmers. Experts will have the opportunity to contribute to our ambitious open-source project. We've previously held similar events at the NICAR confernce in Atlanta and Media Party in Buenos Aires, training more than 70 journalists on how to collaborate with GitHub and making significant improvements to our open source project.

Ben Welsh is the editor of the Data Desk, a team of reporters and computer programmers that work with Los Angeles Times journalists to turn data into news. He is co-founder of the California Civic Data Coalition, a team of journalists dedicated to opening up public data and winner of the 2015 Knight News Challenge. Ben is also the creator of PastPages, an online archive dedicated to the preservation of digital news.

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PITCH: Media Partnerships: The Opportunity of Detroit's Bankruptcy

Weeks after Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the biggest municipal Chapter 9 case in history, five nonprofit media outlets (an online publication, two radio stations, public television and a consortium of ethnic/minority newspapers) came together to collaborate on coverage and leverage the strengths of each media platform. Showcased at NextChapterDetroit.com throughout 2014, the stories, blog posts, programs, interviews, photos, videos, conversations, social media postings and analysis produced by the Detroit Journalism Cooperative helped tell the story of the case and advance understanding of its issues. This session presents the main principles of the DJC partnership including best practices as well as problems and hurdles the collaboration faced. Presenter will explain how the model could work for a variety of media types in other communities to cover other events or issues (including suggested topics and issues for which the model could work), strategies for seeking funding, and what digital infrastructure is needed and how to cost-effectively develop it. Speaker will answer questions, for example, about coverage, communication between the partners, community involvement, the site’s development and design, and how to integrate an initiative as part of a media outlet’s overall brand. Who should attend: anyone interested in developing collaborative media partnerships with a community engagement component.

Sandra Svoboda: Recovering bankruptcy blogger looking forward to chronicling more of Detroit's revitalization. Graduate, Indiana University (Journalism/History) and Wayne State (Master’s in Public Administration). Current grad student in library science/archival administration. Worked previously for The (Toledo) Blade, Detroit’s Metro Times and The Associated Press. Has won awards from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters, Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, State Bar of Michigan, Michigan Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists-Detroit chapter. Adjunct faculty member at Wayne State and UM-Dearborn. Board president, Freedom House Detroit. Mentor, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Metropolitan Detroit and Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Vice president of National Digital Stewardship Alliance, Wayne State student chapter. Loves her husband, dog, bicycle, usually in that order.