I’m running for re-election to the ONA board of directors

Update: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been re-elected to the ONA board!

Whoa! It’s hard to believe that it’s been another two awesome years on the ONA board of directors. I’m running for my third term with a fantastically talented and impressive group of candidates.

Generally, the number of members who cast a ballot is a very small, so please be sure to vote and encourage others to do the same.

Below are my candidate materials (originally published here), including my vision to continue serving the organization. If you have any questions or wish to share your thoughts on how the organization can better serve its members, please let me know.

Continue reading I’m running for re-election to the ONA board of directors

Video and updates from ONA15 session: Whose Idea of the Future Is This?

Inspired by Afrofuturism and other underrepresented perspectives, I organized a session at this year’s Online News Association 2015 conference in Los Angeles with an awesome group of speakers:

We’ve assembled a group of experts on futurism to look at predictions and possibilities for how our society is changing, and help rethink our approach to media, technology and our communities.

Here’s the session page. Here’s the Storify:

Continue reading Video and updates from ONA15 session: Whose Idea of the Future Is This?

Running for ONA board re-election

[Update: I won a second term, yay! Congrats to everyone who was elected/re-elected!]

It’s almost time for the ONA14 conference (yeah!) and that means another board election approaches.

My first term on the board is almost complete and I’m running for re-election. It’s been an honor to serve on the board with such a wonderful and talented group of journalists. ONA continues to make great progress and I’d love to continue serving the members and the organization. If you’re a member (or not yet a member, you should join) — I’d greatly appreciate your vote.

Here are some highlights from my candidate page. I also want to know what you would like from ONA going forward, so please drop me a line in the comments below, on Twitter or privately here:

Vision for ONA and skills I would bring to the board 

ONA members include every type of journalists in every type of news outlet. As an organization we deal with subjects that affect a wide spectrum of the industry — such as leadership, ethics and diversity — and more specific topics — like how to protect sources, use a new tool or adopt new reporting methods.

In order to best serve our members and take advantage of ONA as platform (see http://bit.ly/GLonaboard12), we need to include more voices.

We need more members and participants who are in business, advertising, sales. They also work in the news business and are a notably absent group in our conversations about the present and future.

We similarly need to expand our community to include others outside of news — professionals and academics whose fields share similar fundamentals, themes and practices or who have methods we could learn from and apply to journalism. We should recruit them as associate members.

Artists and architects. Biologists and book-creators. Filmmakers and forensic accountants. Game animators and geographers. Industrial designers and improv actors. Linguists and librarians. Mathematicians and musicians. Poets and philosophers. Sociologists and screenwriters.

We have so much to learn from our peers and colleagues. But, beyond learning from each other, we have even more to learn from those outside our field — the subject-matter experts and specialists.

What are their processes? How do they solve problems? How have they been disrupted? How have they adjusted their business models? What have they made? How have they spearheaded change?

It’s like you’re writing a story. You have the seed of an idea, so you ask a reporter in the next pod if it sounds worth checking. Then you start contacting sources, asking them for other experts and broadening the scope of what you know.

That’s the same kind of expansion we need.

Invite them to local meetups. Ask them to speak at annual conferences. Include them in dCamps and leaderships breakfasts. Appeal to them for guest posts on journalists.org.

Let’s update our rolodex.

 

Quick history of ONA involvement:

  • Member/conference attendee since 2008
  • ONA DC participant and volunteer since 2009
  • Conference video stream team leader 2009-2012
  • Conference speaker in 2012 and 2013
  • Board member since 2012
  • Helped plan dCamp in DC in 2013
  • Board’s point person for journalist.org redesign
  • Conference karaoke instigator since 2011

#ONA13 workshop materials: Using WordPress to Structure your Beat

Materials from the structure your beat session that Stephanie Yiu, Connor Jennings and I presented.

Examples

Politifact

http://www.politifact.com/ (using Django for structure)

– statements

– people (politicians and now pudits)

– legislative bills

– commercials

– states

– true/false spectrum of fact checks

Technically Philly

http://technical.ly/philly/

http://technical.ly/philly/directory/ (uses WordPress)

– people

– organizations

– projects

– expertise

Homicide Watch

http://homicidewatch.org/ (uses Django for structure, WordPress for posts)

Kaiser Family Foundation

has 30+ Custom Post Types that allow for faceting when you search their site:

http://kff.org/search/?s=vaccinations

They combined 10 years of content across 10 CMSes into WordPress:

http://vip.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/kaiser-family-foundation-bringing-20-years-of-data-into-wordpress/

The structured data allows them to generate these maps of State and Global Health Indicators.

http://kff.org/statedata/

http://kff.org/global-indicator/malaria-deaths/#map

General types

  • Crime

  • Education

  • Government

  • Transportation

  • Business

  • Entertainment

  • Arts

  • Restaurants

  • Food/recipes

  • Sports

  • Obits

  • Anything!

How can WordPress help?

Custom post types

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/11/08/complete-guide-custom-post-types/

Custom meta boxes

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/04/create-custom-post-meta-boxes-wordpress/

Plugin

http://wordpress.org/plugins/meta-box

Custom fields

http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Fields

Custom taxonomies

http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/04/create-custom-taxonomies-wordpress/

Misc

http://wordpress.org/plugins/post-meta/

http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/

Come say hello at #ONA13 workshops, karaoke and maybe a lightning talk!

Greetings! I’m here in Atlanta for the Online News Association’s #ONA13 conference — my sixth consecutive ONA. Check out the stuff below, if it strikes your fancy.

Follow me on Twitter as @greglinch and be sure to say hello there and in-person! I’m always happy to talk about ONA, the board, the ONA student committee and a smattering of other things:

  • journalism
  • data and coding
  • science!
  • abstraction in art, poetry and music
  • milkshakes and French toast

Also, say hello to all the wonderful Washington Post folks!

Lightning talk pitch

Vote here for my lightning talk, which you can read the pitch for here.

Workshops

I’m helping to teach a few workshops alongside some awesome folks like Stephanie Yiu, Connor Jennings and Jeremy Bowers. Come join the fun!

Using WordPress to Structure your Beat
#wp4yrbeat
Thursday, 2:45 – 3:45 p.m.
room 401

Digging through notebooks or scanning old articles isn’t the best way to find archival information. Structure your beat using the key subject matter as your foundation to track people, places, organizations, incidents, schools and more.

Editorial Workflows in WordPress
#edflowwp
Friday, 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
International 6

Learn how to use WordPress to control your copy flow, with plugins like Zone Manager, Google Docs and edit flow to wrangle emails.

Programmer Workflow
#programmerwf
Friday, 4:15 – 5 p.m.
room 401

From git to commit, root to branch, learn the best way to go from ack to zsh.

Karaoke

Join us Friday night at 9:30 at the Metro Diner Cafe for the third annual officially unofficial ONA karaoke bash. It’s just a block down that street from the conference hotel. See you there!