Spring Training for Freelancers

Baseball players aren’t the only ones who use springtime to warm up for the regular season. With winter behind us, the writing conference season is in full swing. Conferences can be a good way to inject new life into your freelance business – and pardon the pun – put some spring back in your writing.

Writers in the market for spring training will find lots of conferences aimed at helping them learn how to write for the Web, use digital media audio and video equipment, create multimedia projects, the whole Web 2.0 thing. Here’s some that are open to freelancers, with as much information about dates, locations and costs as I can find:

Journalism That Matters – Journalism meets Silicon Valley in this three-day “mashup” of technology and reporting April 30 to May 3 in Sunnyvale, Calif. Here’s a link to the official JTM conference wiki with a detailed schedule. This one’s pricey – $395 – and limited to the first 150 sign ups. Register here.

Knight Digital Media Center – The Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism is holding multimedia training workshops in May, June and July. Each session lasts six days, with hands-on instruction on topics like using a digital video camera, creating slide shows in Flash and designing Web pages, plus lectures from online publishing experts. The best part: except for the cost of getting there, it’s free, including room and board. The program accepts 20 fellowships per session and they get more applicants than they have room for, so don’t wait to apply. Preference is given to staff writers but freelancers are accepted if they can “demonstrate the ability to impact the organizations they freelance for.” Applications for any of the sessions are due on April 11. Click here to apply.

Mediabistro.com – The online haven for writers is hosting the Mediabistro Circus May 20-21 in New York City. The two-day event has workshops on topics such as social media, online video, blogging and vidcasting and guest speakers such as Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, Blogher co-founder Elisa Camahort and a ton of others.

Online News Association – The association for journalists who work in online news will host its annual seminar and awards banquet on Sept. 10-12 in Washington D.C. at the Capital Hilton. The conference will include a multimedia learning lab, a “show and tell” session on several innovative projects among other sessions on creative news online. To register, click here. To make hotel reservations click here. Room reservations will close after Aug. 11, 2008.

If you can’t afford to go away to a seminar, there are plenty of online resources for teaching yourself more about digital media.

The Knight Digital Media Center maintains an archive of training seminars held at the University of Southern California dating back to 2006 and a separate archive of training seminars held at UC Berkeley that date back even further.

Mindy McAdams is a journalist, online journalism instructor and author of the book, Flash Journalism. She also runs a blog called Teaching Online Journalism. The blog is written for J-school students, but there’s great information on it for freelancers interested in keeping up with the times, including this post on what every J-school student needs to know now – which could easily be retitled what every journalist needs to know how.

Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive – The online version of a book by the same name written by Mark Briggs, assistant managing editor for interactive news at the Tacoma (Wash.) The News Tribune. Download the .pdf version or read some parts online. Briggs also writes a blog called Journalism 2.0 to help writers – including freelancers – “do better journalism with the help of digital technology.”

Wired Journalists – A group of mostly newsroom reporters and editors mulling over the whole Web 2.0 news thing.

If you know of other upcoming seminars on online media open to freelancers, let me know and I’ll update the list.