I’m very pleased to announce that Eric Ulken, a former editor from the Los Angeles Times, is joining the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. Eric is coming as the Canwest Visiting Professor for 2009-2010. He spent four years at the LA Times as managing news editor for latimes.com and as editor of interactive technology. He is known in online journalism circles for developing new ways of collecting, organizing and presenting

Amy Webb presented her very popular session on tech trends before an eager audience of journalists, hoping to find out what the future will bring. Webb explained how she had asked online what were the big trends for journalists. One of the main choices was mobile. But Webb said mobile was a generic term, just as you would say internet. She argued that journalists aren’t thinking of technology in a

Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Twitter, kicked off the Online News Association conference in San Francisco. The format was a fireside chat, except before an audience of hundreds of journalists, academics and developers. He starts by talking about how Twitter has taken off across the world, with major growth for Twitter in the UK, Brazil and Canada.  It is also big in Japan, so Japanese is the only other

The Online News Association conference doesn’t formally kick off until Friday morning. But some of the material is already available online for those who couldn’t make it to San Francisco this year. JD Lasica has posted two new PDF handouts: 8 ways to use social media in the newsroom and 6 Twitter tools for journalists in advance of the panel on social media on Saturday. And Amy Webb has posted

Together with many others passionate about online journalism, I’m heading off to San Francisco for the annual conference of the Online News Association. There is a big focus on practical sessions this year, such as learning about SEO, metrics and, of course, Twitter. One major issue is the dominance of US panelists. While many of these have much to contribute, the ONA is doing its members a disservice by not

The Online News Association conference held in Washington DC brought together some of the brightest minds in digital journalism. So as a journalism educator, I took advantage of the opportunity to pose the question to editors, professors and entrepreneurs – what do they want from journalism graduates? The short video clips have been posted on PBS Mediashift. What was interesting was the consistency of the replies. There was an recognition

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown Robert Scoble sets the theme for his keynote at the Online News Association conference in DC by doing something that wasn’t possible a year ago – video streaming his talk live via a mobile phone. This changes journalism, he argues, as people can send questions as an interview takes place live. Scoble says this takes advantage of the audience, who is smarter, richer, more educated

The ONA session on merging newsrooms, managing drama at the ONA 08 is packed, perhaps a sign this is an issue facing every news organisation. Or as the panel moderator Lee Banville, editor of the Online Newshour, describes it, a group therapy session Peter Horrocks, head of the Multimedia Newsroom at the BBC kicks off the discussion by picking up on the therapy theme by describing his role as the

The Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC kicked off with a keynote from Tina Brown. The former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker might seem an odd choice for an online news forum. But Brown was here to shed some light on The Daily Beast, an editor-driven news aggregation website, a project with Barry Diller and IAC. She started work on the project just eight weeks

In his opening remarks at the Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, ONA president Jonathan Dube described online as a growing, innovative medium, at a time when other mediums are struggling. As the association heads into its 10th year, Dube outlines the priorities – money and members. Attracting more funding and more members is an obvious aim for any professional group. But more significantly, the ONA wants to