About 650 journalists, academics and business people are in San Francisco for the 10th anniversary of the Online News Association. Its annual conference is an enormous resource for journalists evaluating industry and craft change.
Here are some learnings, some sgnificant and some not:

1. Twitter was originally called Twitch, says CEO Ev Williams. When the co-founders looked up the word in the dictionary, it was next to Twitter, which they liked more.
2. Reporters will be replaced by robots and the organizing strategy for news organizations will be media and not news, says futurist and Stanford professor Paul Saffo.
3. Women blog for fun, for expression, but not so much for money, says BlogHer CEO Lisa Stone.
4. For every broadcast Tweet you should three conversationsla Tweets, says veteran journalist J.D. Lasica.
5. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, a start-up will be difficult, says GigaOm's Om Malik.
6. Inside pages have eclipsed home pages as the landing spot online, says Hoa Loranger, director of the Nielsen Norman Group.
7. Treat your users as lazy, selfish and ruthless, which means you have to warn their attention, says West Gold Editoral chief Michael Gold (quoting usability guru Jakob Nielsen).
8. Social media guidelines for employees would be best guided by principles of common sense, says University of Massachusetts professor Steve Fox.
9. The New York Times/ProPublica development, Document Cloud, provides an important option for newsrooms to search, organize and share records.
10. Non-profit models may actually offer more revenue streams than for-profit models, says voiceofsandiego.com chief Scott Lewis.
 
 

The State of the Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism has published a special report today from a survey of 300 Online Journalism Association (ONA) members (me included).

It examined attitudes and practices in the craft and drew some conclusions based on the large sampling. Among the findings from online journalists:

- More optimism than their legacy counterparts and a strong belief  journalism is headed in the right direction.
- Support for the rich-media attributes of digital journalism as positive developments for the craft.
- Concern that standards were loosening, journalists' power was weakening, and speed was subsuming accuracy.
- Predictions that advertising support will be the prime revenue stream in the years to come.

The survey determined a majority of online sites were profitable but had been cross-subsidized by legacy media.

 
 

The Online News Association released its nominees today for its annual awards. The nominations reflect a growing commitment to digital journalism among established organizations but also the significant arrival of several new players (Huffington Post, Politico, TruthDig, RawStory, among others).
Unless I've missed something, all but one of the nominees are based in North America (GEO.fr) and all but four in the U.S. (one from The Ottawa Citizen, two from The Globe and Mail in Canada in addition to the France-based GEO).
The awards will be announced at the association annual conference next month in Washington.

 

DA25E68FDEC14EAFA7B2A27D26C48058