The Linchpen

Saturday

For this month’s joint ONADC/Hacks & Hackers meetup, Derek Willis of The New York Times interactive news technology team will discuss data + coding + journalism and walk through the award-winning Toxic Waters project.

You can watch live (archived video player embedded below) or follow along the Twitter by searching ONADC. If you’re in town, there are still spaces open to attend in person at American University (RSVP here).

Also, here’s a CoverItLive blog where I plan to take notes, chat with anyone following along and pull in any choice tweets.

Thanks to David Johnson at AU for co-organizing and hosting the event, as well as the always magnificent ONA DC co-organizers: Laura Cochran, Tiffany Shackleford and Matt Mansfield.

Also, thanks to Burt Herman, Rich Gordon and Aron Pilhofer — who run the larger Hacks & Hackers — and Sherry Skalko of ONA.

Special thanks to Ethan Klapper, who will be running the live video feed.

The Beyond Bootcamp livestreaming continues Wednesday night at 7 p.m. with New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal‘s (@drewvigal) keynote speech, which will begin the second round of workshops.

Watch the keynote here (not visable in RSS feed) or at:

• http://www.mogulus.com/greglinch

The second set of workshops, which conclude Saturday, includes the following sessions (more about faculty):

• Creating video narratives by Washington Post video guru Travis Fox and University of Miami visual journalism professor Jim Virga.
• Creating effective online infographics by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill visual communication professor Alberto Cairo and New York Times graphics editor Xaquin Gonzalez.
• Multimedia programming for journalists by NYT senior multimedia producer Tom Jackson and Internet consultant Donny Loflin, who specializes in multimedia and application development.

I am attending the infographics workshops because it’s the area I know the least about, though I wish I could take all three!

Notes

Special thanks to Richard Koci Hernandez for embedding the livestream video player at Multimedia Shooter.

Follow all Beyond Bootcamp tweets:

• http://www.greglinch.com/multimedia/beyondbootcamp

As I mentioned the other day, please share the livestream and other links on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, IM, etc.

Sidenote: I received an NBC xylophone-like chime from MSNBC’s Jim Seida for being an “awesome” audio workshop assistant.

I really enjoyed working with Jim and NYT’s Nancy Donaldson during the past three days. They didn’t treat me merely as an assistant (I only fetched water once), but asked me to help participants work in Soundtrack Pro, create their narratives and act as a “third teacher” (Jim’s words).

But, besides helping, I also learned a number of useful tips and tricks. Thanks, Jim and Nancy — you guys rock!

(This post originally appeared here on the Online News Association‘s student journalism discussion group.)

Last week there was an epic Twitter discussion about journalism education.

The conversation continued on the blogosphere and I’d like to offer a few links in the interest of keeping that conversation alive:

Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education – Greg Linch (me)

J-Schools Now – Emily Kostic

Peripheral education – Daniel Bachhuber

What do you think? Please post a comment or, if you blog about this topic, drop a link here.

UPDATE (Dec. 2 at 11 p.m.): Jared Silfies has also weighed in,

Education 2.0: The Internet makes us the computer wearing tennis shoes

New ONA site

Tah-dah! Another social network!

The Online News Association officially launched their new Web site (see right) Monday evening.

If you’re a member with full access, or even a non-member just perusing, you can tell this site is big step forward.

Here are some of the features, as outlined in an e-mail from ONA President Jonathan Dube:

• Networking features, including discussion groups that connect members by region and area of interest, giving you the ability to have one-on-one conversations and to chat in real time.
• An easy-to-navigate membership directory – searchable by name, type of organization, areas of expertise, and more – enabling you to more easily network with people with common interests.
• A Career Center that allows members to post and search job openings.
• A new training section with innovative digital presentations tagged by topic, source and medium. This section features videotaped sessions from ONA’s sold-out 2008 annual conference, with tips on the latest techniques in multimedia storytelling from the New York Times, Washington Post, USA TODAY and the BBC, among others.

So why I am blogging about this? Earlier this month I was asked to be the student group discussion leader, a role I enthusiastically accepted. 

I’ll be posting there a couple times a week in order to start conversations on topics such as classes, cool projects and internships. The group has six members so far, including two pros. 

If you’re a student ONA member, please join us!

If you’re a student interested in online journalism, I highly recommend joining ONA. I joined in April and think ONA is a group often overlooked by student journalists (read about membership benefits).

For only $25 a year, you can’t say no.

One benefit is that you get a heavily discounted conference registration — we’re talking less than half the pro rate.

And if you saw my posts or tweets about this year’s gathering in D.C., you’d see why the experience is so valuable. I went to a number of great sessions, but more important are the connections you make.

NETWORKING IS KEY! (see No. 8)

As someone in the midst of an internship – and soon job – search, I can’t emphasize that enough.