UPDATE: If you’re looking for speaker presentations, head to our Google Doc for links.
Looking for the latest in digital skills? Join us for a day of hands-on training with some of the top leaders in digital journalism. This session, split up into workshops, will cover the latest in digital investigative reporting, mobile reporting, social media, audience engagement skills and and web tools. Get on the fast track to better reporting with greater impact using the power of the Internet. This exciting day of intensive digital journalism training is organized by the Online News Association, courtesy of a grant from the Gannett Foundation.
Lunch will be provided for all registrants.
Program
Social Media as a Reporting Tool
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
With real-time reporting, social networks have become a prequel to the newsroom, providing peer-to-peer conversation, audience engagement, sources and resources. Not to mention they are often the highest traffic drivers to news sites. This session will show you the benefits of social media and the hottest tools and techniques to report your story faster and more efficiently.
Presenter: Niketa Patel, Product Manager, Social Media, CNN Money
Mobile Newsgathering: Reporting from the Field
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Reporting on-the-go has never been easier when all the tools you need can fit into your head. This session will show you the reporting power of the smartphone. We’ll show you the basics of how to use hand-held devices as a journalistic tool, featured apps to use as well as best practices for reporting, editing and sharing stories to any media platform with your smart phone.
Presenter: Justin Ellis, Assistant Editor, Nieman Lab
(Mostly) Free Tools
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Take a whirlwind tour of free tools that will let you stream live video, edit digital photos, become a social media power user, create HTML charts, analyze search keywords, embed polls and create interactive slideshows.
Presenter: Kwan Booth, Co-Founder, Oakland Local
Tumblr for Newsrooms
11:00 a.m. – Noon
Audience engagement is not only about keeping customers happy, it also helps cultivate loyal readers who will return repeatedly. This session will explore use of Tumblr, one of the most user-friendly platforms for boosting this engagement. This session also will demonstrate best practices and tools for building meaningful online communities, as well as how journalists can move from the web to mobile to real-life connections.
Presenter: Phoebe Connelly, Editor, Yahoo! News
Lunch
Noon – 1 p.m.
Next Levs: Immersive Reporting & Newsgames
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Video games have long fascinated many. As technology advances, so have the tools to augment our experience. Piggybacking on recent advances in virtual reality technology, Nonny de la Peña has begun offering powerful news experiences to the public. Her work uses the latest virtual reality goggles coupled with compelling audio to create a first-person experience of the events or situations that take place in the real world. By harnessing the sense of presence – or being there – that comes with these 3D technologies, her brand of immersive journalism allows an audience member to personally engage with a story through unprecedented access to the sights, sounds, and even feelings and emotions, which accompany the news.
Presenter: Nonny de la Peña, Annenberg Fellow, Founder, ImmersiveJournalism.com & Stroome.com
Google Fusion 101
2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Journalists know it’s crucial to back up stories with cold, hard facts. Numbers and statistics are essential. They can contribute toward the creation of interactive visualizations that allow readers to focus on parts of the story most important to them, and to make their own discoveries. Participants in this session will learn how to find datasets, how to extract stories within data and, ultimately, how to present that data through sortable tables and interactive maps created with Google FusionTables. By the end of the session, participants will have completed a functioning interactive data visualization, and will have learned how to apply visualization techniques to stories that can have deep meaning for local communities. Participants should bring laptops.
Presenter: John Keefe, Senior Editor for Data News & Journalism Technology, WNYC