ONA DC thoughts: Black Versace glasses, the Kool Aid Grant, why journalism & ONA is kinda broken and how to kinda fix them

I’m not going to blather on too much since I didn’t blog from the event because there’s a student blog and PaidContent or the thousands of other bloggers all up in that.

Here are (hopefully) my quick thoughts/notes from ONA DC:

• Black Versace frames are the new hotness. (All the cool kids were wearing them.)

• Pointy shoulders are also pretty big. Everyone loves them shoulder pads.

• Next year there should be a “bring a non-member for free” campaign and two tracks for the conference. This is the second year in a row that I’ve finished ONA and thought, “We’ll yea… you’re preaching to the freakin’ choir. Tell me something I don’t know.” I’m sure there are many organizations out there with Managing Editors who have no clue what RSS feeds are, nor do they care about the Web. There are probably even more with websites out there shackled by Editor in Chiefs who fear user content like the plague. I propose that ONA offers a “Kool Aid” grant. So members could BRING A NON-BELIEVER FOR FREE! AND LOCK THEM IN THE HOTEL FOR THE WEEKEND! GET A BEER BONG AND START POURING THAT KOOL AID. I’m really serious here.The “dual track” thing would offer an alternative deeper experience to those of us who already know Adrian is the man and why… The second track would instead be a more technically- and practically-based “think tank” experience. I guess that is… if people will share information. Which is another thing that drives me nuts…

• ONA’s value as an organization is plagued with this unfortunate duality of concealing and sharing information. “We’re all competitors against each other” or something… so it takes 3 years for someone to actually discuss how they did something awesome in detail and why it works with the rest of ONA. There’s this weird information sharing/blocking duality that really bothers me (Just about as much as people skimping on link trackbacks). But I guess what are we to expect from an organization that charges $149 for an audio CD of the conference ($12 for single sessions). which brings me to…

• ONA, if you’re going to charge for audio of the conference, just pay your costs and maybe a little extra kick back for the foundation… so, $10? That’s fair. But $149 is absolute highway robbery. Wait-a-be a team player, ONA. Thanks for helping out the industry. At the very least, offer the whole conference CD at a discounted rate to members who couldn’t attend. Or save your costs and offer it as an MP3 download. It’s like freaking locking old news archives under a paid wall… The financial gain from locking the content isn’t worth the value it could provide to the industry.

• The ONA board seriously needs to do something about the award structure. First off, I’ve discussed this before on here (and with ONA contest administrators) but there are some major accounting issues in how circulation is judged. I see some MAJOR websites getting questionably placed into categories (at least according to ComScore) that they shouldn’t be. I also see some some small (yet exceptional) sites (like Roanoke.com) getting lumped in with the biggest in the industry because they don’t have a category for the proper circulation levels.Second, I’m apprehensive about saying there needs to be more awards because if that ceremony gets much longer, they’re going to need to offer an open bar, a comedy act, pool tables or something. But … something’s gotta change. For instance, student projects should be split by “school supported” and “independent.” Maybe even “multiple school supported,” “school supported” and “independent” because there’s just a vast, vast difference in having 50+ professionals, teachers, students and consultants working on a project vs. one aspiring photographer doing a multimedia experiment.Also, less generic overall website awards and more innovation and diversified multimedia awards would really help everyone in the biz see the best of what’s out there (Maybe the awards ceremony every year wouldn’t just be, “Oh, yea, NYTimes.com rules. We know.” every year.) (No offense, I dig the NYTimes. I’m just sayin’.) Howard Owens nailed this discussion further.Part of me also wants to suggest a tippy-top tier award structure… like Small, Medium, Large and “The Four” … (NYTimes, Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC … it’s been a long day and I’m probably forgetting someone, so please forgive me.) Everyone and their brother knows “The Four” are awesome and they quickly snipe much of the talent in the industry with their large salaries, deep resource war chests and ultra-metro lifestyles. (OT: What would online journalism innovation be like if there was a nuke attack on NYC, DC and Seattle?) So just let “The Four” duke it out together and pass around some of those pointy glass awards among the large, medium and small organizations that are doing excellent work, but getting eclipsed by the big dogs.(I should clearly state for the record that I was pleasantly surprised by many of the winners this year getting the recognition they deserved. This diatribe is more from years of watching these awards and the organization evolve. I think things are getting better but not fast enough.)
• Soundslides rules and just about everyone knows that by now. I think I saw it mentioned in five presentations. FIVE!

• There must be a HUGE demand for luggage tags. … Or maybe the advertisers/booth all read the same marketing magazine article or something… Pens, mints and luggage tags were just about all the free schwag I could find. (I was kind of bummed since last year’s AFP 64 mb jump drive has been sooooooo awesome to me. I’ve almost worn it out.)

• W.T.F. is up with everyone taking the teen panel as gospel? I thought we were journalists? Does anyone question anything anymore?I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.As you may know, I following the whole youth media/intiative scene and really wasn’t too impressed with the cliché panel. At times, the Gannett moderator appeared to be feeding them responses. “Who here has a watch? You don’t, You don’t?” … while the teens start pulling back their shirt cuffs showing her their watches… “OH..”Don’t get me wrong, the kids definitely made a lot of points that were consistent with most of what I’ve found, but … well, this panel was just way, way too well groomed and perfectly hand picked. And they fed off the moderator and audience’s feedback. Seriously, one of the panelists (the gamer) was also the subject of the American U. video they displayed. Are there only four teens in the D.C. metro area?OT: Anyone notice in the video with the Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo-like music when the moderator said something about ‘X blonde girl uses Photoshop to edit her images,’ she’s using MS Paint? I found that particularly hilarious and indicative of the great job we do listening to and portraying real teens.I’m particularly disturbed by the way everyone’s flippin’ our about the teens’ comments about “we like text” as a way for getting news. If you listened to what the kids were talking about and not just the sound bite, you’d understand they were saying they like the utility and quickness of text for basic information. They can grab and go. And if they want more depth they can dig deeper. Alternative story forms are rarely used, so how were they to know if they’d prefer that? In 1980, if you would have offered someone an MP3 would they have wanted it even though they didn’t understand how to use it, or that it even existed? I’ve seen too many people turn that sound bite into a, “HUZZAH! LET’S KEEP WRITING 32478932749832 WORD ARTICLES,” argument and less about the utility and importance of giving information quickly to readers.

  Overall, I understand that this wasn’t set up as a scientific survey or any sort of clear test group… but they why is everyone so hot over repeating the teens responses as pristine truths? Anecdotal evidence is worth as much as a candle maker in the 21st century, which is all what we’re going to be the equivalent of if we don’t stop being such a bunch of antiquated, sound-bite salivating, quick fix monkeys. It just drives me insane how we’re becoming the same cliché, back-patting media execs we claim to be so much smarter and more innovative than.

  Maybe I’m totally alone on this.

  But that wouldn’t surprise me, I tend to relate to whippersnappers exponentially more than the people with ties, close cropped hair and pointy-shoulder sport coats

  Anyway…

• Yahoo-tini’s are way, way too sweet, but get one anyway and pocked the plastic ice-cube thing. (Nice transistion there, Will.)

• Multimedia content management / automation is becoming a huge challenge. Ignore the fact that whole most content management systems blow. Ignore the whole multimedia archive issue, just the workflow of getting the content up on sites is a gargantuan issue. There’s no clear “DUN DUUUN!” tool (like Soundslides for photo/audio slideshows) available for this and it’s needed very badly (and hopefully inexpensively like Soundslides).Most online staffs can’t handle recreating the wheel for each project and templating can only take you so far. I tried to talk Gabriel Dance (who’s really quite remarkable, if you haven’t heard of him) into releasing the modules/CMS that he built for the backbone of The Ancient Way and Chasing Cruso. I don’t think he was down with it but we’ll see what happens.Hopefully something will emerge this year, because as more print staffs drink the web KoolAid (hopefully due to my proposed ONA Kool Aid Grant), we’ll have more opportunities for multimedia content… and since very few places are hiring the staff to scale to this new online push, streamlining workflow is critical to maintain quality standards and content, branding and … well, to just simply get the job done as efficiently as possible.

• Overall, I’m not as optimistic as Jarvis is about this year’s conference. Yes, it was twice as good as last year. Yes, there was optimism and people talking about doing new stuff and making changes, but I’m not sure if it’s enough, fast enough. Yes, they got Adrian to talk about what why he’s the man (instead of RSS feeds or some other mumbo jumbo like last year).But I didn’t see a lot of innovation (at least anything I hadn’t heard about before the conference). I saw a slight smugness that ad revenue in online is increasing and print is declining. I saw some satisfaction that suddenly online is getting props in the industry/newsroom (and rightfully so).What worried me most was, is there didn’t seem to be much concern about how the transition from print to the web is in no way going to financially support news operations or quality journalism at its current levels—at least I didn’t see many people loosing their hair as much as I am about this–The reader that checks your site occassionally throughout the week and clicks on 3-5 stories (if you’re lucky) spending less than 5 minutes with your website is not as valuable as the newspaper individual that sits down just about every morning and spends 10-20 minutes going through the pages of a newspaper (not that everyone really does, but on the web, traffic and time spent is accurately trackable and as advertisers continue to see the great scam that newspapers have been pulling off for the past 50 years, many, many throats are going to be cut). And it doesn’t need to be that way if we adapt now, change our methods of delivery and content forms to suite the audience need.Specifically, I really think we need more Cauthorns, Cubans, Jarvi’s’s’’ss (what’s the plural of Jarvis? Jarvi?) and Arringtons to get ONA and the media thinking differently about the product, organization structure and content forms, as well as distribution.

Ok… so this ended up being WAY, WAY longer than I’d planned. But I always seem to leave an ONA event with a lot of, uh … “passion.” Thanks for letting me share it. Overall the conference was a good experience and would like to thank everyone involved and for all their hard work improving the organization. Lets keep it going.

And, uh… lemme quote this:

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no place I’d rather be, the grass ain’t greener on the other genocide.
But tell Huey Freeman don’t forget to mow the lawn and uproot the weeds, cause I’m not satisfied.
(J-Live, “Satisfied”)

Please feel free to share your thoughts on ONA, Versace fashion or saving journalism in the comments. (I feel very ‘E-Media Tidbits’ saying that.)

UPDATE: (10/12/2006): I just wanted to thank everyone who’s commented publicly and privately. I’m really surprised by the response to this… I’m not sure if it’s the “please feel free to share your thoughts” thing or that I’ve touched a nerve.

So thanks again and I’d like to encourage you all to let your opinions know with the ONA (or any journalism organization heading in the wrong direction, for that matter). I’m just one obscure dude. I don’t own a media company. I don’t exactly have the pull in the biz. I’m not as polished, prim and proper as the journalism networking gang.

Anyway, thanks and keep reading, commenting and raging against the machine.