Thanks to the Center for Public Interest Journalism, I attended the Online News Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was there on behalf of the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network, where I work as an application developer and help journalist acquire, process, and visualize data. Being new to the field of journalism, as well as this being my first professional conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It turned out to be a really immersive and inspiring experience, with lots of networking, that was a little short on the data-journalism side of things.

####Sessions

I was pleased with the variety of sessions that were offered. Not all of them were relevant to me, but I was able to find a session to attend for each time slot.

There were many lessons to be learned from The Business of Collaboration session for PPIIN; which aims to collaborate with local news organizations. The most important takeaway for me was from Stephen Engelberg, the managing editor of ProPublica. He said to make sure to work out the small details and logistics of any collaboration first. This includes things like bylines, publication date, logos, etc. If those things are taken care of initially, there will be less of a chance of something coming up that delays or kills the project. Engelberg mentioned that after about 150 collaborations, there are some organizations (none were named) that they may not partner with again, but not a single collaboration has gone wrong.

In the Collect, Clean and Manipulate: A Data Journalism Workshop session Jennifer LaFleur, Director of Computer-Assisted Reporting at ProPublica, went over some of her techniques for requesting data from public agencies. While it wasn’t really a workshop, LaFleur had a lot of good tips for those interacting with public data keepers. I asked if she would ever consider providing an agency data admin an extraction script or walk them through a data export process. Her answer was basically “yes” and she said she has done just about everything to get data; which is what I was hoping to hear.

At the Designing Digital Newsrooms session Steve Herrmann, Editor of BBC News Online, gave an overview of how the BBC combined all its various newsrooms (TV, radio, online) into one collaborative newsroom contained in the same space. This change allowed them to create a much more consistent news experience for all of their audiences.

One of the last presentations I saw was David Wright’s Design Is How It Works. To me, it was by far the most focused, engaging, and well executed talk at the conference. This is partially due to Wright’s charisma (he seems like a pretty funny guy) and public-speaking skills, but he also kept his presentation focused, nicely wove in anecdotes, and provided lots of examples to make his case. He clearly articulated the importance of design-based thinking in news and I think made a good case for an agile work environment; both of which I fully support.

####One critique

From a developer perspective, I was a bit underwhelmed with the conference offerings for data-journalists. This was more apparent in retrospect, but I think the conference is designed to have many high-level sessions for a broad audience. And, in many cases, rather than data-journalists furthering their skills, it serves as an opportunity for non-developers to learn about new technology and tools. This can be seen in the pre-conference workshops, like Intro to Practical Programming and Intro to Data Viz, and in some of the sessions.

One instance of this was Amy Webb’s popular annual 10 tech trends session. While it’s billed as a forecast, it seemed more like a recap (I didn’t attend the session, but I followed it on Twitter and read a few summaries). For example, trend number 4 was Responsive Design. The book on responsive design was published in June of 2011. The first major use of responsive design in journalism was The Boston Globe relaunch in September 2011. Several other news organizations have since published and are actively creating responsive sites and news applications. I feel like some of the other trends on the list (verification, video, and directed advertising in particular) are not really new trends, but have practices that are commonly used online.

####In the end

Thanks again to the Center for Public Interest Journalism for sending me, as well as 25 other Philadelphia journalists, to ONA. I had a great time and it left me feeling inspired. While I didn’t learn that much in terms of data-journalism, I did learn a lot about the field of journalism. It was also great to meet so many new journalists (mostly from Philly, ironically). The next event I’m really looking forward to is the annual NICAR conference in February 2013. Based on attendees reactions from last year’s conference, it should be another immersive, inspiring experience.