News you can use: 10 top takeaways from the 2009 ONA conference

It’s been one of the worst years on record for the news industry, what with newspapers and magazines closing or shrinking substantially and shedding tens of thousands of jobs** in the process.

Given everything that’s happened, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a lot of doom and gloom at a news industry gathering.

That may be the case at other conferences, but the recent Online News Association annual meeting was anything but gloomy.

In fact, the mood of the 750 or so reporters, editors, website designers, photojournalists and others who made the trek to San Francisco was decidedly upbeat.

They know a secret. The newspaper business is dying – but the news business isn’t. It’s being transformed – and they’re the ones doing it.

It’s ironic to call online news the new direction of the newspaper and magazine industry. After all, some of the people who came to the ONA convention have been in the business of putting news on the Internet for more than a decade.

But as with banking, dating and other services that shifted to the Web, it takes time for cutting edge technology to go mainstream. And so it has been with the news business.

The 2009 ONA conference was equal parts validation of what veteran online news practitioners have been doing lo these many years and a chance for younger techie journalists to strut their stuff and rub shoulders with industry muckety-mucks.

But the two-day event wasn’t all tech talk. It also featured inspired discussions of new revenue models, collaboration, entrepreneurial journalism and how to preserve old-fashioned storytelling in a multimedia world.

Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 takeaways from the 2009 ONA conference:

1. Innovate. Journalists, including freelance writers should be trying out different writing styles, storytelling approaches, and markets to see how they feel. You don’t always need to know what the outcome will be of this experimentation. In fact, chances are you won’t know what the outcome will be. Do it anyway, and worry about how you’ll turn it into a business model later. Those words of wisdom come from none other than Ev Williams, cofounder of Twitter – and look where it got him.

2. Side projects are a good thing. If you can’t afford to work on your dream project full time, make it a sideline affair that you put hours into after your day job. Or if you can swing it, make your dream project your primary gig, but keep enough sideline work to pay the bills until you hit pay dirt.

3. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Ev Williams and those other Twitter guys, tech radio show host Leo LaPorte, BlogHer women’s blog network founder Lisa Stone – they all worked on multiple ventures for years before hitting the big time. Yes, they got lucky, but not until after a long slog through obscurity.

4. Think application, not publication. The Internet’s taught us that news isn’t static. The age of slapping something up on a page, whether online or in print, is over. As several ONA presenters told the crowd, readers today don’t really think or even care about where they get their news, they just want the information. So instead of thinking of what you do as a publication, think of it as an application and then make it as easy as possible for readers to use you to find what they’re interested in.

5. Crowdsourcing works. And not just for finding sources for stories. Journalists at ONA talked about using crowdsourcing resources to track news, refine story ideas, share works in progress, get reader feedback and ask for funding. But some (established) news organizations are schizophrenic when it comes to this: on the one hand they’re embracing the new ways, on the other hand, they’re telling reporters not to follow sources on social media networks or tweet too much about the stories they’re working on. (This is why I’m happy I work for myself).

6. Interact with readers. Not just one way but many ways – through blog comments, forums, RSS feeds, hyperlocal blogs that let them help you or your organization report stories. Remember George H.W. Bush’s a thousand points of light? Give readers a thousand points of entry – OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the picture.

7. Technology is your friend. The techies are going to save the news. And that’s a good thing. Case in point: the ONA gave one of its 2009 Online Journalism Awards to Publish2, a latform for collaborative journalism based on link journalism.

8. If you don’t know how to do something, work with somebody who does. You don’t need to know content management systems, search engine optimization, and the other Web-based mumbo jumbo in order to make it as a journalist in the 21st century. You do need to know what the technologies are, so you can apply them to the work you’re doing. And you need to know where to find the people who know so you can ask them to work with you, and then speak their language on the project you do together. Not sure where to look? In Portland, I’d go to the Friday afternoon Beer & Blog gatherings, Abraham Hyatt’s Portland Digital Journalism gatherings or any of the other local tech meetups that happen here on a regular basis.

9. Talk amongst yourselves. The open source mind-set that originated in tech circles is slowly making its way to the news business. Nobody’s sharing company secrets, but they are more open about solving problems that everyone has – like how to get more readers to your website, what makes good news design online and how to make the experience easy and fun for readers. Case in point: at ONA, the New York Times demo’d an app called Document Viewer that lets you publish original documents on a website without asking readers to click to open a separate .pdf file. At the meeting, the Times said it will release the app to the public in a matter of weeks. To paraphrase Rachel Ray, how cool is that? Thanks NYT.

10. Don’t be afraid to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not learning what works and what doesn’t. Nobody wants to fail on an epic scale. So save your innovations for small projects – if they won’t work, it’ll help you figure out why. If they do work, you can apply them to bigger projects.

As you can image, when 750 journalists get together, a lot gets written about what transpired and the 2009 ONA conference was no exception. To read more on the ONA conference, follow the Twitter hashtag #ONA09.

**Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts blog (not to be confused with the New York Times’ blog of the same name that covers book publishing) tracks total U.S. newspaper industry layoffs and buyouts on a very cool interactive Google map. 2009 total to date: 13,668.