yo so tomorrow i’m going to washington d.c. for the online news association conference and awards that is this weekend. i’m looking forward to it for several reasons:
1. i’m going to get to catch up with some old friends including esteemed photographer ray jones (XXX) and good friend and infographics god alberto cairo. in fact ray is crashing on the floor of my hotel room. i told him if he was lucky, i’d pull in a cot. i’m also going to see my old roommate and maybe a couple other peeps. rock!
2. there are some really cool sessions that i’m looking forward to checking out including: the keynote address by marc cuban, owner of the dallas mavericks and blogger; Made for the medium: Best of the Best with alberto, seth gitner (roanoke) and ashley wells (msnbc); Automating genius through tools with adrian holovaty (washpost, chicago crime), Staffing and structure with neil chase (nytimes) and rob curley (washpost); and the State of the industry super panel with Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch), Mike Davidson (Newsvine) and Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine, Daylife).
really, these should be awesome opportunities to interact with the best. which is how to get better by the way.
and finally,
3. the awards are presented on saturday night. my current employer, NYTimes.com is up for General Excellence in Online Journalism which i sure hope we win, but i’m really looking forward to the student journalism category where two projects i worked on (out of five nominees) are up for the prize including Chasing Crusoe, for which i was director of programming, and The Ancient Way, for which I was a producer. i really want chasing crusoe to win, and i think it should.
anyhow, if anybody else is going to be there for the session, make sure you holla at me and to all my other peeps, i’m looking forward to seeing each and every one of you.