It’s Day Two of the International Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, and having given my presentation on Global Voices yesterday, I have no further obligations besides networking and business card distribution.
Prof. Rosental Alves, who created the symposium nine years ago, has put on a solid show. The meeting is very well organised, the auditorium we’re occupying is the perfect size (it was just about filled to capacity yesterday), comfortable, well outfitted with power outlets for each seat and glitch-free wifi and the room temperature has been tolerable (these may seem like trivial things, but it’s astonishing how often conference organisers don’t get it right).
Rosental’s students, who appear to be in charge of much of the organisation, are also doing a fine job covering the event on the conference blog, posting well-captioned images on Flickr and videos of the sessions on YouTube, and it’s been delightful to see them not only making use of these tools but using them well.
A less successful feature of the blog is the inclusion of personal Twitter feeds from a few of the students: setting up a dedicated Twitter feed for the conference or using hashtags would probably have been a better idea. I’ve also been checking in on the CoverItLive liveblog that was in effect yesterday but which seems to have crashed and burned this morning. A conference tag (onlinejournalismutexas?) published beforehand on the conference web site would have been useful as well in aggregating the online commentary and media being uploaded by conference attendees.
This is assuming that conference attendees are actually posting their impressions online. Apart from Alf Hermida‘s concise and eloquent reports on Reportr.net, there’s very little commentary online, which is perhaps unsurpising considering that the room is full of journalists and media people, as opposed to bloggers. Alf and I chatted during this morning’s coffee break about the recurring theme of hyperlocality in the symposium presentations. Alf didn’t seem as disheartened as a few other conference attendees at Dallas Morning News publisher’s Jim Moroney III’s championing of the hyperlocal during yesterday’s keynote, but we both agreed that most people attending journalism school today (Alf’s students at the University of British Columbia, for example) probably had their sights set on something slightly more exotic than the local beat. Alf pointed out that the hyperlocal emphasis doesn’t bode well, either, for Global Voices’ efforts to get our content used by mainstream media sites. But as I noted in my presentation, diaspora communities in American cities might well have a different idea of what “local” means.
An interesting counterpoint to the emphasis on hyperlocality has been the relatively cosmopolitan roster of invitees. There’s a strong Latin American component to the event, with a number of attendees from Brazil and a few from Argentina and Colombia. There have been presentations so far from Spain, Norway, Colombia, and Neil Thurman from City University, London, whom I met in Vilanova last November, just presented a paper on UK media companies’ embrace of multimedia along with Ben Lupton. Chris Kabwato is also here pushing Highway Africa, the annual ICT conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, whose focus this year will be citizen media.
Off to lunch now.
