NINA Fall Conference

New ways
to tell big stories

DeKalb – NINA’s Oct. 24 Fall Conference features two top-flight speakers, along with our annual awards luncheon.

New media remains a heavy focus for NINA, with the day’s topics centering on new ways to cover big stories, along with steps journalists can take to retrain themselves for an uncertain future.

Steve Buttry, editor of the Gazette and GazetteOnline of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, will talk about "Covering Disaster in the Digital Age." Buttry was brand-new to the Gazette this June when floods ravaged Cedar Rapids. Running on generator power, the paper and Web site heroically continued to publish despite flood waters being just outside the office door.

Buttry will talk about how the Gazette took advantage of new media to provide comprehensive coverage of the disaster.

Our second speaker, Curt Chandler of Penn State University, makes a return visit to DeKalb, after leading our spring conference on new media. Chandler will continue that conversation with "Five Things That Will Make You a Better Online Journalist." He will focus on reporting, social networking and interacting with readers.

Here are some of the attendees’ comments from Chandler’s NINA presentation in April:

• "This guy was great. This workshop helped me start to think about reporting the news in different ways depending on the story."


• "Best, most informative NINA event I have attended."

Fall Conference info

When: Friday, Oct. 24, 2008

Schedule:
8:30: Registration / refreshments
9-10: Steve Buttry
10-10:15 Break
10:15-11:30: Curt Chandler
11:30-11:50: Q&A with speakers
Noon: Awards luncheon and keynote by Steve Buttry

Sessions venue: Campus Life Building, Room 100, NIU-DeKalb

Awards Luncheon venue: Duke Ellington Ballroom, Holmes Student Center, NIU-DeKalb

Cost: $60 for the first attendee from each newspaper; $30 for each additional person; $20 if attending the workshops only.

Parking: Use the Newman Center lot, just north of the Campus Life Building on Newman Lane. Parking pass available here. If the Newman lot is full, use the NIU visitor lot (follow signs off Lincoln Highway).

Registration deadline: Friday, Oct. 17. Registration form is here.

Questions? Contact Valerie Clawson at 815-753-1564, or vclawson@niu.edu.

About our speakers

Steve Buttry joined The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and GazetteOnline as editor this year. He has spent 37 years in journalism, starting his senior year of high school as a sports writer at The Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa. He has been a reporter, editor and writing coach for the Des Moines Register, Kansas City Star and Times, Minot Daily News and Omaha World-Herald. Steve has been training journalists and newspaper executives for more than 11 years. He has trained and consulted at more than 200 newspapers, conferences and seminars in 40 states, eight Canadian provinces, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Ecuador. Before joining The Gazette, he spent three years with the American Press Institute, focusing mostly on teaching and research in the Newspaper Next innovation project. He remains affiliated with API, conducting the Upholding and Updating Ethical Standards seminar series.

Curt Chandler is senior lecturer specializing in multimedia reporting at Penn State University. Before entering the academic world last summer, he was the editor for online innovation at the post-gazette.com in Pittsburgh. Curt has a degree in newspaper writing from Northwestern University and more than 25 years of newspaper experience as a visual journalist, manager and online editor. He also worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner and the Pueblo (Colo.) Chieftan. He has conducted multimedia training in newsroom and seminars for working journalists in addition to working in the classroom with students who aspire to be journalists.