Save the Date for ONA12, West Coast-style

It’s not too early to plan your trip to the 2012 Online News Association Conference & Awards Banquet in San Francisco, a city that epitomizes the pioneer spirit.

ONA12, Sept. 20-22, will tap into the Bay Area’s innovative media, tech and entrepreneur communities and the hundreds of biotech and information technology companies that are thriving in Silicon Valley. Add world-class restaurants, museums, theaters and orchestras and a ballpark, and you have the makings of a terrific three-day (or longer) stay.

Here’s a guide to who’s running the show, where you can stay and how much you should budget.

Meet our co-chairs

Pam Maples, Innovation Director at the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University 
Pam is deeply involved in the Knight Fellowships’ efforts to help journalists identify and develop new models for sustaining high quality journalism during this period of profound transformation. She helps guide Knight Fellows who are pursuing ideas focused on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership and works to connect them to resources, people and organizations at Stanford and in Silicon Valley. Pam joined the Knight Fellowships in 2010, after extensive experience as an editor and reporter.

From 2006-2009, she was managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she led the full integration of print and online news operations. Under her leadership, the staff was recognized for the first time with several national digital journalism awards and was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for its real-time coverage of a mass public shooting. After the Post-Dispatch, Pam worked with the video news start-up Newsy.com, where she developed editorial strategy and operations.

Earlier in her career, Pam worked for several years at The Dallas Morning News, ultimately as assistant managing editor/investigations and projects. She was a reporting member of a Morning News team that won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Pam also worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in Denver, Albuquerque and Springfield, Mo. She has served as a Pulitzer juror (investigative panel chair, 2009) and is a member of the Journalism and Women’s Symposium. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and was a 2006 Knight Fellow at Stanford.

Anthony Moor, Director of Editorial Operations at Yahoo! 
Anthony is the media network’s leader for product and platform innovation. Until recently, he led the company’s local news efforts as Managing Editor. In Nov. 2011, the team launched its first comprehensive Yahoo local news and information experience for the United States. He served as Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive at The Dallas Morning News. In 2008 the site was honored with RTNDA’s Edward R. Murrow Award as best non-broadcast Web site.

He was editor of OrlandoSentinel.com, a 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation winner and 2006 Online News Association general excellence finalist. Prior to that he was New Media Editor at the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, where he devised the paper’s convergence strategy and won a 2003 OJA for creative use of the medium. He developed an interest in interactive media at San Francisco’s KRON-TV during the dot-com boom, while covering ventures with names such as RealAudio, Hotwired, Quokka and PointCast. The lure of the Internet startup eventually enticed him to join a broadband business news pioneer called On24, as a financial correspondent.

In his early career, he was an investigative reporter in Buffalo and state capitol bureau chief in Santa Fe, N.M. He spent two years in Tokyo working variously at the ABC News and CNN bureaus. He has served on the board of the Online News Association, where he directed the Online Journalism Awards, and was a director of ASNE, the American Society of News Editors. He holds a degree in Astrophysics and American Civilization from Williams College. And he’s been on “Oprah” — although not for any professional reason.

Burt Herman, Co-Founder, Storify 
Burt, the ONA Board liaison to ONA12, co-founded Storify, a platform for creating stories from social media. He has been named by the Poynter Institute as one of the most influential journalists in social media, and frequently speaks and writes about the changing media landscape. Burt is an ONA Board member.

Burt previously worked as a journalist at The Associated Press. In his dozen years there, he served as Korea bureau chief, founded a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia and reported on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other assignments worldwide. Burt was a 2008-9 Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where he also received a bachelor’s degree with honors in political science and Master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European studies.

David Cohn, Program Chair, Founder and Director at Spot.us 
David (aka DigiDave) is the founder and director of Spot.us, a nonprofit that is pioneering “community funded reporting.” He has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times among other publications. While working toward his Master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cohn worked with Jay Rosen as editor of the groundbreaking Newassignment.net in 2006, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web. Cohn also worked with Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine.com to organize the first Networked Journalism Summits, which brought together the best practices of collaborative journalism three years in a row (2007-2009).

In academics, he is a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s journalism school and was a fellow at the University of Missouri’s Journalism school at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. He has been a contributing editor at NewsTrust.net, a founding editor of Broowaha and an advisor to many new media projects from OffTheBus.net and Beatblogging.org to The Public Press. He is a frequent speaker on topics related to new media and beyond.

Meet our hotel

Reserve your room at the Hyatt Regency, overlooking San Francisco Bay, an easy walk to many nearby sights, and located directly across the street from the Ferry Building, with over 200 shops and restaurants. Rates for a standard room are $235, a great deal for this higher-end city, and door-to-door service between SFO Airport and the Hyatt is $16 online or $17 in person. Reserve your room here.

Meet our new registration packages

Registration for ONA12 opens April 10. Join ONA and save $300 on the general pass.

Our goal is to keep our conference as affordable as possible, and this year, registration fees will remain at their 2011 rates. We’ll also stick with the restructured fee timeline we established last year. Translation: The earlier you register, the lower your fee.

This year, we’re also reworking Thursday’s programming so one price will get you into any on-site workshop, the Career Summit or Job Fair on Thursday, Sept. 20. (Any other events outside the hotel will be a separate registration, as always.) Look for more details on the Thursday workshop pass in the coming weeks.

There will be 1,000 general passes available for ONA12. Once we’re sold out, we really are sold out.

ONA12 General Pass prices

Interested in sponsoring or exhibiting? Fill out this form or email Tom Regan.

Cheers,

Pam Maples, Anthony Moor and Burt Herman, ONA12 Conference Chairs
Jane McDonnell, Executive Director