Meet the #ONA16 Social Team

When ONA16 gets under way, you won’t need to be in six places at once, thanks to these 14 curators, who will be keeping you up to date on all sessions — live. They’ll be watching for the best content shared by attendees and pulling it together to help tell the stories of the sessions as they unfold.

Meet the social team:

 
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ONA16 Keynote offers candid insights into creating a social newsroom with Andy Carvin and reported.ly team

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, announces the closing keynote for the 2016 Online News Association Conference, a candid look into the creation and unknown fate of the unique social newswire reported.ly, featuring founding editor Andy Carvin and his team.

Joining in conversation with Andy, who serves as reported.ly’s Editor-In-Chief, are Deputy Managing Editor — and ONA Board member — P. Kim Bui; Anchor/Reporter Wendy Carrillo; Anchor/Producer Asteris Masouras, and Social Journalist Marina Petrillo. On Sept. 17, they will sit down with moderator Mathew Ingram, Senior Writer at Fortune, for an inside look into how they created an innovative social news operation with a small team, and next steps as they part ways with First Look Media.
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Have a big idea? Pitch an ONA16 Lightning Talk

via GIPHY

Every ONA conference is driven by ideas from the digital journalism community. In the spring, we take session pitches through the Suggestion Box, and throughout the spring and summer, the Program Team helps select and build out sessions. Now, just before the conference, we’re opening up two more ways to get involved: the Lightning Talks and the Unconference.

If you’ve got an idea for a full-blown conference session, you should pitch the unconference. If you’ve got a big idea to share and the guts to present it in five minutes or less, send us your lightning talk by Thursday, September 15.

The best part about lightning talks is that they are exciting, fast,  invigorating and full of good ideas.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Figure out what you want to talk about.  (A highlight reel on a great project, your side hustle that no one knows about yet, a love letter to your favorite beat … the sky’s the limit, as long as you’re PASSIONATE about it).
  2. Pitch your idea to the ONA16 Lightning Talks.
  3. Convince your friends and other conference attendees to vote for your session. You can use #ONA16lt to join the conversation on social or our main conference hashtag, #ONA16.
  4. Vote for your own session and other lightning talks you want to see. Voting takes place at the conference on Friday.
  5. When you win, (as you will since you will have submitted an exciting idea that you are passionate about and people are fascinated by),  prep your lightning talk! Keep it under five minutes and get to the point quickly! No need for lots of background — explain your idea as quickly as possible. If you make a presentation, use it to show the audience good examples and great jokes. Don’t create a slide deck of every word you are going to say. We can’t read that fast.
  6. Give your awesome lighting talk in front of ONA16 attendees on Saturday, Sept. 17 from 4 – 5 p.m., after our Saturday keynote and before the Online Journalism Awards banquet!

Ask ONA16 speakers questions … in advance

Help shape the conversations at ONA16! This year, we’re using Hearken to connect you to speakers in advance of the conference. This is your opportunity to ask some of the top minds in journalism questions about all things digital. The more questions you (and your digital journalism friends) submit, the better our speakers can tailor their talks to what you care about most.

If you’re curious about an emerging trend, want to know more about a topic or are hoping that speakers will dig into a specific issue during their sessions, now’s your chance to post a question.

We’ve embedded question forms on the session pages. To see them, just click on a session from the schedule and you can post your question directly on the ONA16 site. We’ve created hashtags for each session, so you can keep the conversation going on social media, too.

Screen Shot 2016-07-13 at 8.29.16 PMFor example, if this is your first time attending the conference and you are curious about what to expect, how to plan your day, or what sessions are a can’t-miss, just ask the speakers leading the first-timer orientation a question.

We’re looking forward to seeing your questions!

ONA16 Keynote: A Fireside Chat with Facebook’s Fidji Simo

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, announces the opening keynote for the 2016 Online News Association Conference, a fireside chat with Fidji Simo, Facebook’s Director of Product, and Samantha Barry, Senior Director of Social News at CNN.

Fidji and Samantha will join more than 2,000 attendees Thursday, Sept. 15, at ONA16 in Denver for a candid look into product development at one of the world’s largest and best-known tech companies and how their products impact media. The conversation will focus on the new opportunities — and challenges — for publishers based on the new features and products that Facebook has released in the past 16 months.

Facebook is the largest multimedia platform on the planet, with more than one billion users per day. In 2016 alone, the company introduced Facebook Live, opened up Instant Articles to newsrooms of all sizes and made adjustments to the Facebook algorithm that impact publishers. Fidji and Samantha will discuss each of these updates, as well as how each decision Facebook makes now has an even more profound effect on news publishers and how communities receive and interact with news.

“This year, as audience appetite for news on social media platforms explodes, we’ve seen Facebook’s media role expand to everything from live, fast-breaking news events to politics and culture,” said ONA Executive Director Jane McDonnell. “We hope this crucial conversation will give journalists a long-awaited inside view into the company’s decision-making process and products.”

Fidji Simo sqFidji Simo is a Director of Product who leads the product teams in charge of Media (Video, News, Influencers) and Advertising in News Feed. Most recently, she launched Live videos, videos and video ads that autoplay in News Feed, and Instant Articles. She was also in charge of simplifying Facebook’s ad product suite from 27 ad formats to only seven. Fidji joined Facebook from eBay. There, she was part of the Strategy group and rotated through eBay’s main offices of France, Spain and the U.S., then joined eBay’s incubation team to develop new growth businesses. She holds a Master of Management from HEC Paris and spent the last year of her Master program at UCLA Anderson School of Business.

CNN Digital Rebranding 2014 Samantha Barry

CNN Digital Rebranding 2014
Samantha Barry

Samantha Barry serves as CNN’s head of social media and senior director of social news, managing the company’s global social media teams. Her teams span social publishing, news-gathering, digital and TV and are responsible for the largest social accounts of any news brand in the world. The path from Ireland to the United States has been a global one for Samantha, who, after stints in RTE and Newstalk, traveled the world working for ABC Australia and the U.S. State Department, training young journalists in creating content for social media platforms, before taking a role at BBC World News in London. Samantha is also currently a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University and a guest lecturer at Yale.

Register now to join us for this important conversation at ONA16, which will bring together journalists, technologists, educators and students in Denver for three days of programming exploring the most forward-thinking trends in the news industry. ONA members save more than $300 off of the cost of registration and ONA offers discounts on groups of 10 or more.

The Online News Association is the world’s largest association of digital journalists. ONA’s mission is to inspire innovation and excellence among journalists to better serve the public. The membership includes news writers, producers, designers, editors, bloggers, developers, photographers, educators, students and others who produce news for and support digital delivery systems. ONA hosts the annual Online News Association conference and administers the Online Journalism Awards.

ONA16 Keynote: A Candid Look at Facebook Product Development

We’re excited to announce our opening keynote for ONA16: A rare, candid and fascinating look into product development at one of the world’s largest and best-known tech companies.

On Thursday, Sept. 15, attendees are invited to a fireside chat with Fidji Simo, Facebook’s Director of Product and CNN’s Senior Director of Social News Samantha Barry, an incisive leader whose background ranges from training journalists around the world on creating social content for various platforms to making strategic decisions about when and how to use Facebook to support CNN’s news coverage.

Facebook is the largest multimedia platform on the planet, with more than one billion users per day. Its reach alone makes the company’s influence on digital news and content distribution difficult to overstate. Add to that an astonishing number of features and products released over the last 16 months, all of which introduced fascinating news opportunities for publishers.

While the potential reach of these products is groundbreaking, each major decision Facebook makes now has a profound impact on how communities receive and interact with news — and not every decision favors news publishers.

To name just a few developments this year:

  • Facebook Live, essentially a live streaming platform for mobile phones, was launched. While its core is similar in functionality to Meerkat and Periscope, the sheer size of Facebook’s audience made it instant competition. The launch also included a map to explore public broadcasts happening around the world.
  • An adjustment to the algorithm powering News Feed promotes updates from friends and family over publishers’ content.
  • The company shut down Paper, its eye-catching news-reading app.
  • Instant Articles, a product designed to host media content and make articles load faster and appear more fully integrated into News Feed’s design, is made available to all publishers.

Our conversation will touch on all things product, allowing ONA16 attendees to gain critical insights into how decisions are made. We’ll also discuss how Facebook continues to evolve its offerings and the impact those choices will have on publishers.


Fidji Simo sqFidji Simo is a Director of Product who leads the product teams in charge of Media (Video, News, Influencers) and Advertising in News Feed. Most recently, she launched Live videos, videos and video ads that autoplay in News Feed, and Instant Articles. She was also in charge of simplifying Facebook’s ad product suite from 27 ad formats to only 7. Fidji joined Facebook from eBay. There, she was part of the Strategy group and rotated through eBay’s main offices of France, Spain and the US, then joined eBay’s incubation team to develop new growth businesses. She holds a Master of Management from HEC Paris and spent the last year of her Master program at UCLA Anderson School of Business.

Samantha Barry serves as CNN’s head of social media and senior director of social news, managing the company’s global social media teams. Her teams span social publishing, news-gathering, digital and TV and are responsible for the largest social accounts of any news brand in the world. The path from Ireland to the US has been a global one for Samantha, who, after stints in RTE and Newstalk, travelled the world working for ABC Australia and the US State Department, training young journalists in creating content for social media platforms, before taking a role at BBC World News in London. Samantha is also currently a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University and a guest-lecturer at Yale.

Build your ONA16 schedule with our conference app

AppScreenshot (1)If you’d like to build your own schedule by favoriting or storing those can’t-miss-sessions in one place, we’ve got an app for that!  Our free, easy-to-use mobile app will help you create a personalized schedule with a few simple taps. (If you want to view live blogs and video during the conference, session pages on our website schedule will host those, as they have in years past.)
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Get ready for the ONA16 Unconference!

Let’s get ready to uncon!

Every year, some of the smartest people in digital journalism gather at the Online News Association’s annual conference.

And every year since 2009, we have given those people the chance to take the conference into their own hands with the unconference.

So, what IS the unconference? Easy: Attendees get the chance to pitch what they think should be a part of this year’s discussion. Maybe we’ll sit in a circle and talk about what we love besides journalism. Maybe we’ll consider how design thinking applies to our daily tasks. Maybe we’ll just get to meet the people we follow on Twitter.

That’s the beauty of the unconference: It can be anything we want it to be.

So how does it work? You (yes, you) can start pitching your session ideas on Thursday, Aug. 18 on our Tumblr site. Keep the pitches coming through the first day of the conference, Thursday, Sept. 15. We’ll post all the pitches we receive on this site.

On Friday, Sept. 16, you’ll see Team Uncon roaming the conference corridors, asking you to vote (please vote!). We’ll then tally the votes on Friday night and announce which sessions will be included on Saturday, Sept. 16.

Come Saturday, if your session was selected, you’re on! You’ll have one of the following time slots:

  • 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (two sessions)
  • 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. (three sessions)

A couple caveats: The opportunity to lead a session is intended for people who are already attending the conference. They’re also meant to be about journalism, not a platform for companies to sell their products.

Beyond that, the rules are up to you. Do you want to host a workshop? Do you want to put together your dream panel? Do you want to take a break and not think about “the future of journalism” for an hour? Let’s do it. Let’s uncon.

Any questions? Contact us at onaunconference@gmail.com.

Happy brainstorming!

Get Started


Estepa_Jess_120Jessica Estepa is a Senior Digital Producer at National Geographic Partners. She has been involved with ONA since 2009, starting with the student newsroom and now as the team captain of the unconference track for the past six years and as an organizer of the #ONADC chapter. A recovering congressional and federal government reporter, she likes waffles and news.

Google News Lab, Knight Foundation and ONA launch coalition to help newsrooms experiment with immersive storytelling

360 Partnership 16x9DENVER – Sept. 15, 2016 – The Online News Association announced today that it will join with the Google News Lab and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help newsrooms experiment with and advance the field of immersive storytelling.

The project, called Journalism 360, will use grants, workshops, webinars and online resources to support a network of journalists using 360 video, augmented and virtual reality for storytelling. Two immersive storytelling pioneers, Mitch Gelman, chief technology officer of the Newseum, and Sarah Hill, chief executive officer and chief storyteller of Story Up VR, will lead efforts for the online resource hub. ONA will work with Google and Knight to build an international network of journalists focused on sharing ideas and best practices through live events, training and workshops.
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2016 Online Journalism Awards finalists announced

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Finalists for the 2016 Online Journalism Awards, representing a wide range of nonprofit, public, academic, major media and emerging technology organizations from around the globe, were announced today by the Online News Association.

Twelve of the awards now come with $53,500 in prize money, courtesy of Knight Foundation, the Gannett Foundation and the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. These awards honor data journalism, visual digital storytelling, investigative journalism, public service, technical innovation, student journalism and general excellence.

This year’s awards reflect a deeper consideration of how newsrooms engage their audiences, focusing on the emerging prevalence of new digital tools, distribution channels and content platforms. The second James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting will again honor one of the many journalists reporting under the most challenging conditions; a special committee will select the recipient.

“The range of this year’s finalists is truly remarkable,” said David Smydra, ONA Board member and Online Journalism Awards Committee Chair. “In so many respects — newsroom size, geography, subject matter, platform, technology, storytelling techniques and more — judges were extremely impressed by the full scope and achievements of digital journalists across the industry.”

A group of 76 industry-leading journalists and new media professionals teamed up to screen 1,029 entries and select semi-finalists. Twenty judges representing a diverse cross-section of the industry then conferred to determine finalists and winners.

The winners will be announced at the 2016 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet on Saturday, Sept. 17, in Denver.

The finalists, many of whom push the envelope of innovation and excellence in digital storytelling and distribution, are:

Breaking News, Medium
Breaking News, Large
Breaking News, Small

No finalists

Planned News/Events, Small
Planned News/Events, Medium
Planned News/Events, Large
Explanatory Reporting, Small
Explanatory Reporting, Medium
Explanatory Reporting, Large
Topical Reporting, Small
Topical Reporting, Medium
Topical Reporting, Large
Online Commentary
Sports, Small
Sports, Medium
Sports, Large
Feature, Small
Feature, Medium
Feature, Large
The David Teeuwen Student Journalism Award, Small
The David Teeuwen Student Journalism Award, Large
Pro-Am Student Award
  • America’s Weed Rush, Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University
  • Bridging Selma, Morgan State University School of Global Journalism and Communication and West Virginia University Reed College of Media
  • Return to Chernobyl, NYU Journalism – Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and FRONTLINE
  • Out of the Shadows, UBC Graduate School of Journalism
The University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism, Small/Medium
The University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism, Large
Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling, Small
Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling, Medium
Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling, Large
Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, Small
The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, Medium
The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, Large
Knight Award for Public Service
General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small
General Excellence in Online Journalism, Medium
General Excellence in Online Journalism, Large

The judges for finalists were:

  • Matt Carroll, Future of News, MIT Media Lab
  • Katelin Chow, Digital Journalist, NPR Code Switch
  • Jenn Chang Crandall, Artist-in-Residence, Alabama Media Group
  • Kenan Davis, Head of Interactive, Guardian US
  • Meghann Farnsworth, Engagement Editor, Recode
  • Priya Ganapati, Product Director, Quartz
  • Mónica Guzmán, Seattle-based journalist & 2016 Nieman Fellow
  • Joshua Hatch, Assistant Managing Editor, Data and Interactives, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Chronicle of Philanthropy
  • Robert Hernandez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, USC Annenberg School of Journalism
  • Liz Heron, Executive Editor, Huffington Post
  • Rich Jaroslovsky, Vice President for Content, SmartNews, Inc.
  • S. Mitra Kalita, VP Programming, CNN
  • Martin Kotynek, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, ZEIT ONLINE
  • Jacqui Maher, Interactive Journalist, BBC News Labs
  • Miguel Paz, distinguished lecturer in Data Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, founder of Poderopedia
  • Rhyne Piggott, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Middle Tennessee State University.
  • Robert Quigley, Innovation Director and Senior Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism
  • Nabil Wakim, Director, Editorial Innovation, Le Monde
  • Sisi Wei, News Applications Developer, ProPublica
  • Anita Zielina, Editor-in-Chief New Products, NZZ, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung

*Judges were recused from discussing categories in which their own organizations were entered.

Launched in 2000, the OJAs are the only comprehensive set of journalism prizes honoring excellence in digital journalism.

About ONA
The Online News Association is the world’s largest association of online journalists. ONA’s mission is to inspire innovation and excellence among journalists to better serve the public. The membership includes news writers, producers, designers, editors, bloggers, technologists, photographers, academics, students and others who produce and distribute news for digital delivery systems. ONA also hosts the annual Online News Association annual conference and administers the Online Journalism Awards.

About Knight Foundation
knight-logo-300Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org

About the Gannett Foundation
gannett-foundationThe Gannett Foundation is a corporate foundation sponsored by Gannett Co., Inc. whose mission is to invest in the future of the communities in which Gannett does business, and in the future of our industry. It supports projects that take a creative approach to fundamental issues such as education and neighborhood improvement, economic development, youth development, community problem-solving, assistance to disadvantaged people, environmental conservation and cultural enrichment.

About the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications
university-of-florida-cjcThe University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications is driving innovation and engagement across the disciplines of advertising, journalism, public relations and telecommunication. The strength of its programs, faculty, students and alumni — in research and in practice — has earned the college ongoing recognition as one of the best in the nation among its peers. The college offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and certificates, both online and on campus. The college’s strength is drawn from both academic rigor and experiential learning. The college includes seven broadcast and digital media properties and the nation’s only chair in public interest communications.