Meet us at ONA'15!
It's that time of the year again! The annual Online News Association’s conference is coming up in Los Angeles on September 24-26. Always a yearly highlight, ONA is one of the world's premier events for news and technology.
This year, Sourcefabric will be presenting its new Superdesk newsroom system as well as highlight some of our new and upcoming releases: The Newscoop Storyteller longform theme, the Verified Pixel image verification tool, Live Blog 3.0 and Airtime Pro.
Sharing what we are doing at Sourcefabric is only half of the reason I am excited to be attending again, I am also looking forward to a number of the sessions on the program:
The Tow Center’s Emily Bell will host Google’s Richard Gingras in a conversation that promises to be interesting and lively, given the news industry’s frenemy status with Google. Considering that before joining the Tow Center, Emily Bell was director of digital content at the Guardian, and that Gingras is the senior director of news and social products at Google, this event could be insightful, to say the least.
I’m always interested in new beats, and the LA Times’ recent decision to put a beat reporter in charge of ‘Black Twitter’ - people of color on social media - was an interesting decision, considering how, even in 2015, coverage of ethnic minorities in the US is still far from optimal. There’s a session on “Black Twitter and Beyond” at ONA, and this promises to be very interesting.
Immersive, 360-degree video is very hot these days, and considering that GoPro has unveiled its new, $15,000 Odyssey video rig, we can expect to see a lot more of this video being made, especially as VR headsets like those from Facebook’s Oculus, Google’s Magic Gate and Microsoft’s HoloLens hit the market next year. “360 video for newsrooms of any size,” is a session led by Thomas Wallner of Deep Inc., a company that makes immersive media, and this one looks like it will be very interesting. In case you haven’t caught up on what 360 video is, here’s a demo from GoPro (use your arrow keys to navigate, but imagine watching this on one of those VR headsets and try not to get motion sickness).
What’s cool about ONA is that they also have a very lively “Midway” area, where exhibitors, cool startups and others from journalism and related fields get to pitch the room, have fun activities and basically get away from panels-and-powerpoints for a while. Sourcefabric will lead a workshop going into some of Superdesk’s features and advantages at the Midway Thursday at 1:30pm and Friday at noon, so come by and drop in!
Are you headed to ONA? Drop me a line and we can get in touch. Find me on Twitter @dougiegyro or shoot me an email. You can also stay up to date with the event by following the event hashtag #ONA15 or follow the event twitter @ONAConf.