This story first appeared on RJI’s Futures Lab. Reporting by Rachel Wise.
PART 1: ONA16 conference recap
This year’s gathering of the Online News Association brought together more than 2,200 digital journalists and innovators from all over the world for a three-day showcase of the latest trends and ideas moving journalism forward. There were many discussions that took place in Denver this year — on topics including virtual reality, distributed content, interactive tools, audience engagement, analytics and impact.
But there were four key topics dominated both the conference schedule and hallway conversations: automation, immersive storytelling, social media platforms and experimentation. We sat down with two ONA leaders — Joshua Hatch, ONA president and assistant managing editor of data and interactives at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and David Cohn, ONA treasurer and senior director at Alpha Group — to talk about major themes and key takeaways from this year’s conference.
[To skip directly to this segment in YouTube, click here.]
PART 2: Tech Trends from Amy Webb
Object recognition, crowdlearning, mixed reality, conversational computing and augmented journalism are some of the technologies likely to shape journalism over the next several years, according to Amy Webb, founder and chief executive officer of the Future Today Institute. We sit down with her to get some details about some of the most important technological shifts on the horizon, and where each might be 10 years from now.
[To skip directly to this segment in YouTube, click here.]
For more information:
- Slide deck from Amy Webb’s ONA 2016 presentation
- Full video of Amy Webb’s ONA 2016 Tech Trends presentation
- A Dropbox folder full of downloadable resources from her session and beyond
- Amy Webb’s newest book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, is about forecasting future tech trends. The book will be released Dec. 6, 2016, but is available for preorder now.
For more from the conference:
A newsroom staffed by college students provided detailed coverage from the event.
Short video interviews with many of the presenters from the conference can be found in this ONA16 YouTube playlist.
Full videos of several entire sessions, along with presentation materials and compilations of related Tweets, are accessible through the conference program schedule page. (Click on the individual session to access the video and/or Twitter material.)
A collaborative resource guide from ONA16, with links to different websites and tools mentioned in various sessions, can be found in this Google Sheet.
Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.
The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the receive email notification of each new episode.
