I’ll be hitting the road later this afternoon, headed for Minneapolis for the 2009 American Copy Editors Society National Conference.
Can’t make it to conference this year? Check the ACES Web site for resources from speakers and panelists. (Click on Schedule at the top of the page.) Some sessions already a PDF or PowerPoint posted.
Happy editing!
Talk about a discount, folks.
BIG Omaha promises to be a fabulous event. Just look at the lineup of speakers. It’s not often that even one of these thinkers and doers comes to Nebraska. The organizers behind the first-ever BIG Omaha are pulling them in all at once for the event on May 7-8.
Not bad.
What’s better, though, is they’re making students quite a deal: $99 registration for the first 99 to register.
That’s half-off the current registration price of $199.
If nothing else, ask yourself this: How could this conference not be an awesome opportunity when they managed to work cows into the logo for an event targeting entrepreneurs, creatives and innovators?
A lesson for all you event planners out there: If a cow is in your logo, I’m there.
You should be, too.
Register today to ensure you’re among the first 99 students.
Any student journalist with half a brain can see that things in the industry aren’t pretty right now.
Layoffs are turning colleagues into former colleagues, and the lucky ones who get to stick around are finding they have a week or so more free time thanks to furloughs. Bottom line: The business model is broken.
Fear and hand-wringing accomplishes nothing, though. I’d rather do something about it.
If my fellow students and I want to find jobs after graduation, we may just have to create our own opportunties.
To learn how, UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications is offering us a little help.
The J-school is partnering the the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship to host a one-day workshop in Andersen Hall.
One of the college’s newer professors, Carla Kimbrough, has been planning this event, and as a UNL student, I’m so happy to see someone spearheading this effort to bring the entrepreneurial spirit into the J-school.
Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, will be speaking at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s journalism college tomorrow. His Q&A will be moderated by professor Rick Alloway, who had the magical ability to keep me engaged in his JOUR 101 lectures at 8:30 every morning back during my freshman year.
So it should be a good time.
I’ll be helping with the @UNL_CoJMC account tomorrow, but I’ll also have my account (@emilyingram) open. (Thank you, Twhirl!) So you can expect plenty of updates throughout the day.
Speaking of the rest of the day, Evan is also speaking at the Raikes School of Computer Science and Management, too. I was not involved in the planning of that at all, but here is what I know about the livestream for that talk:
UNL’s press release about Ev’s visit has more information.
Next week will be – in a word – crazy.
On Wednesday, I’m giving what I hope will be a fun and lively talk on how student journalists should market themselves on the Web. As one of the few journalism and advertising double majors at UNL, I don’t understand why every student doesn’t have – at the very least – an online portfolio, resume and presence on social media.
Seriously.
And after Wednesday, you could know the basics of how to have all three.
The Wednesday event will also serve as sort of a crash course of sorts for what students need to know about the Web as they prepare for internships and the ever-tiring job hunt.
Plus, I promise to keep things fun. 
I don’t pretend to be an expert on this by any means, but I figure that I’ve done enough trial and error on the Web that I should have some talking points worth a listen.
However, my talk is but an opening act for the main event that will take place Friday.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) will be on at the J-School, and the College of Journalism and Mass Communications has planned a laid-back Q&A event for 3 p.m. in Andersen Hall.
If you’re a UNL journalism student, you do not want to miss this. But for student journalists who don’t call the Cornhusker State home, you’re still in luck.
The college will be livestreaming the Q&A on its Web site, and I will be moderating questions via Twitter.
Have a question about Twitter, or how it relates to journalism, or something else entirely? Send it to me at @emilyingram.
How to Market Yourself on the Web
Wednesday, April 8 at 5 p.m. in Andersen Hall (Room 15)
Q&A with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter
Friday, April 10 at 3 p.m. in Andersen Hall (Room 15)
Confession: I’m a nerd who spends her free time building Web sites.
Good, now that we have that out of the way, you can go check out ACES-UNL’s new Web site.
It’s still a work in progress, but I’m happy with what we have so far.
While you’re at it, go visit the national ACES group’s snazzy Web site for our national conference that is sneaking up on us.
To most of the country, Nebraska is the middle of nowhere.
We’re considered a wasteland between Chicago and Denver, the flat part of the country that is much better to fly over than drive through, the kind of place that produces produce, beef and little else.
To that I say: What a bunch of hooey.
Bottom line: People are doing cool things in Nebraska. You just may not know it.
Two entrepreneurs are trying to change that. Enter Jeff Slobotski (@jjsnyc) and Dusty Davidson (@dustyd), the duo behind Silicon Prairie News.
… A website dedicated to providing news and information about Omaha’s creative class which includes, but not limited to, entrepreneurs, innovator, investors, artists and visionaries.
Cool, huh?
When looking at the future of journalism and keep hearing “niche-markets-this and niche-markets-that,” it’s easy to get lost in the macro view.
The World-Herald’s readership base is so broad that the paper can’t focus solely on the Omaha entrepreneurship beat like a blog can.
And judging by their site’s traffic, plenty of readers are looking for the kind of information SPN provides.
And to top it all off, Davidson and Slobotski are truly connected to their readership. They’re planning BIG Omaha, a May conference that is set to reel in some major players from the entrepreneurship world.
The full schedule is available and includes folks from WordPress and Threadless, as well as Jason Fried of 37Signals and the always inspiring Gary Vaynerchuk.
So what’s my point?
Kudos to Jeff and Dusty for showing Nebraska’s young, budding entrepreneurs that they can make things happen right here in the Midwest and for nurturing that spirit of innovation through events like BIG Omaha.
I normally stick to journalism- or media-related topics on this blog, but these were just too cool to not share.
Plus, I find innovative ideas – no matter what they deal with – inspire me to think outside the box.
Now join me in wishing you had a set of blocks like this when you were a kid:
This week’s tally:
For us, this is a huge leap forward. What makes me especially excited is that the workload for these projects was spread out over the entire staff:
Though our Web department is still set off on its own (not necessarily a good thing), we can’t do it all on our own. (Our Web staff includes just four people; our total staff is around 150. You do the math.)
A question: What recruitment/motivation techniques have worked well for reporters specifically at your news organization?
First off, don’t judge this video by its neon title slide. I promise it’s amazingly good and is unlike probably anything else you’ve run across lately on your RSS reader.
The official blurb about this keynote address:
Professor Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Communications, NYU, provides insights into latest research on the transformative nature of the internet on the economic and social dynamics of consumers and users, and their commercial implications – vital information for regulators, industry and investors as they seek to remain relevant in this new ecology.
My translation:
Everything you think you know about how the Internet, economy and media intersect is wrong. Rushkoff explains what’s really going on.
(via Joey Baker over at CoPress)
It’s a long video and is pretty intense, but I assure you it’s well worth your time and brain strain.
Recent Comments