During day two of Confession Sessions, we asked ONA attendees to share why they got into this business and to look ahead to future of journalism.

Liz Lufkin, co-chair of the 2009 ONA Conference, reveals the moment she knew she wanted to become a journalist. from Online News Association on Vimeo.

Watch all of the Confession Sessions from the conference:

Want to chime in? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

ONA Conference workshops have focused almost exclusively on North American issues and trends.  But one session, “The State of Global Innovation,” brought an international perspective. Editors from Spain, Germany, Mexico and Brazil converged to discuss how they are keeping their publications fresh and relevant.  “Unique conditions in each of these countries produce unique responses,” said moderator James Brinier, director of Universidad de Guadalajara’s center for digital journalism.  Here’s a sample of what they had to offer:

From Brazil: Going mobile

There are only 180 million mobile subscribers in Brazil, said O Globo Executive Editor Raquel Almeida, but she believes the technology is about to take off.  “Something huge is coming,” she said, and O Globo is trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering news on every available platform and keeping up communication with its readers.

For O Globo, this has meant building a mobile Web site that allows readers to vote and comment and creating a mobile app that lets readers submit stories and photos directly to the newsroom.  “We gave this to our readers, then suddenly people were sending reports from all over the city,” said Almeida.  “We had eyes and ears all over the place.”

Spain: Innovating Social Content

Newsrooms across America are scrambling to integrate Twitter into reporting, but Madrid-based news site soitu.es is heading in the opposite direction.  Twitter can be a great source of information, said soitu Director Borja Echevarria. “But we believe it shouldn’t be the only one.”

Twitter crashes, it doesn’t allow users to post photos in a stream, and it can’t be used to post an interview anyone can follow, Echevarria said.  So instead of building a Twitter application, soitu built its own social network, utoi, and devoted the top right column of its homepage to displaying utoi content.   The feed has text, links and photos contributed by both community members and soitu reporters.  Controlling its own social network has allowed soitu to benefit from user engagement but still allows editorial staff to filter and prioritize what makes it onto the site. Utoi launched just 15 days ago, Echevarria said, and they’re working to develop utoi widgets and other tools to keep the network spreading. “It’s very important for us to experiment, to innovate.”

Germany: Staying Sticky

The vast majority of traffic to Spiegel Online’s German and English sites is direct, reports Spiegel International Editor Daryl Lindsey.  Many users keep Spiegel Online as their homepage–especially the German edition, for which only 10 percent of the traffic comes from search engines.  To keep repeat visitors, the site needs a constant supply of fresh, unique content.  “We’re a shovelware-free zone,” Lindsey said.

Spiegel International does experiment with community-generated content, but professionally produced text-and-photo journalism is still the core of the site, says Lindsey.  What makes this possible is a staff of 100 journalists in a Web-only newsroom.  Other German publications cut staff after the dot.com crash, but Spiegel online held staffing steady and has since been increasing.  “In five years we might have the same crisis that’s happening here with the San Francisco Chronicle,” concedes Lindsey. But for now, Spiegel online is going strong–the Web-only newsroom has been turning a profit since 2007.

Isabel Esterman is a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. She is working in the student newsroom at ONA’09.

David Cohn was a panelist on the 6 in 60 session. Photo by Nicole Fallek

Sonny Mayugba’s hyperlocal news site, the Sacramento Press, was the winning contender by the judges’ vote. The audience, in contrast, chose Stroome, a concept for browser-based video editing and sharing.

The five competitors were chosen out of a pool of 20 that met the criteria. Projects had to be less then 18 months old and could have received no more than $20,000 in funding to date.

Each of the competitors was given five minutes to pitch an idea. The pitches included Suzanne Yada’s idea for organizing and distributing community calendar events to publications, Stefano Valentino’s idea for mobile crowd sourcing and Josh Wilson’s peer-to-peer news production model, Newsdesk.org.

After the session, we put Mayugba to the test, asking him to give us his elevator pitch–in an elevator:

ElevatorPitch from Online News Association on Vimeo.

Noah Buhayar, an Oakland-based freelance reporter and multimedia producer, is a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

HD cameras, high-fidelity microphones and professional editing software can produce beautiful, polished videos.  But what if you need to get something up on the Web fast?

User studies show the public generally values flexibility and timeliness over perfection, said Tiffany Campbell, a seattletimes.com producer.  Sometimes, quick and dirty is the way to go.

For breaking news or short companion videos, simple tools like the Flip camera and iMovie may be the best choice, said Campbell.   They may not produce documentary-quality films, but the production value is good enough not to discourage viewers, and they allow reporters to shoot, edit, and post a story in as little as an hour.

That sounded like a challenge to me, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I went to Campbell’s workshop armed with a Flip camera and a tripod, aiming to produce a short video based on the session. I have some experience with shooting and editing video, but I’d never touched a Flip before, or edited with iMovie, so I planned to give myself an hour to import and edit my footage.

The Flip’s audio quality isn’t much better than a cell phone, Campbell warned, and the camera performs poorly in low light.  Otherwise, it’s about as foolproof as a video recorder can get.  A button on the side turns it on, plus and minus buttons zoom in and out, and a big red button starts recording. The flip has a tripod mount on the bottom, and once I got it clipped in, I could easily move around the room, looking for shots.

The real advantage, though, comes when it’s time to import.  There’s no tape to capture, no intermediate codec to run through.  You just open iMovie, plug in the Flip’s built-in USB connector and hit ‘Import.’

I had a little trouble when I tried importing my own footage. iMovie ’08 gave me repeated error messages–a problem other workshop participants complained of as well. I switched to a computer with iMovie ‘09, and it still took two tries to get all of my clips into iMovie.  But even with these setbacks, I was ready to start editing in 10 minutes.  Compared to logging DV tape or flash video, this was lightening fast.

iMovie definitely has its shortcomings.  I found it hard to make precise edits, I couldn’t edit audio waveforms, and I had to rely on a few preset options for adding text. But I also found the limitations oddly liberating–I was free from worrying too much about artistic choices, and could concentrate on moving as fast as my limited skill would allow.

At 56 minutes in, I was ready to show my piece to a colleague.  He suggested tightening up a few sections, which took another 10 minutes.  After two minutes exporting to an m4v file, I had a finished piece, ready to be uploaded.  I took eight minutes longer than I’d hoped, and a few of my cuts were pretty rough.  I don’t think this video is great, but I think it just might be good enough.

Isabel Esterman, a freelance photojournalist and a graduate student in journalism and Asian studies at UC Berkeley, is a member of the ONA09 student newsroom.

The Confession Session Booth at ONA '09

By Amanda Dyer and Natalie Yemenidjian

When will you hold the last newspaper in your hands? What gives you hope in this challenging time for our industry? And what’s the past tense of “tweet”? We have no idea. So, we passed our questions along to the talented journalists who were brave enough to enter our confessional.

Confession Sessions is an attempt by the ONA Student Newsroom to find answers to the tough questions facing journalists today.

Look for the confessional — and new questions — on Sunday near the ONA registration desk. (Update: Confession Sessions: Day 2 is posted.)

When will the last newspaper roll off the presses? from Online News Association on Vimeo.

It’s been a tough year for journalism. What’s given you hope? from Online News Association on Vimeo.

What’s the past tense of the verb “to tweet”? from Online News Association on Vimeo.

More Confessions Sessions:

Liz Lufkin’s Career: What’s Patty Hearst Got to Do With It? – The answers to this and more questions on Confessions Sessions: Day 2.

San Francisco residents talk about how they get their news.

Sponsored by the Associated Press and in partnership with Livestream.com, we’ll be streaming a majority of sessions from ONA09 today and tomorrow (Friday and Saturday, Oct. 2 and 3).

The following sessions are available to the general public live at http://www.livestream.com/onlinenewsassociation.

• Saturday, 7 p.m. PT:
  Online Journalism Awards Presentation

The following sessions are available to the general public on-demand at http://www.livestream.com/onlinenewsassociation.

• Keynote presentation, Twitter Founder/CEO Evan Williams
  (Note: this presentation will be available in its entirety later today)
  
• Keynote presentation, technology journalist Leo Laporte
• Keynote presentation, BlogHer Founder/CEO Lisa Stone
  (Note: this presentation will be available in its entirety later today)

On Friday and Saturday, 16 of 18 sessions from the Front End and Back End tracks are available free to ONA members and $25 each day to non-members. The links below will provide a downloadable PDF which contains passwords and links needed to access the live streams.

Friday Front End and Back End Sessions:
http://journalists.org/store/view_product.asp?id=379269
(Note, the session “Ten Tech Trends You’ve Still Never Heard Of” ” will not be streamed.)

Saturday Front End and Back End Sessions:
http://journalists.org/store/view_product.asp?id=379290(Note, the session “You Invent It, They Fund It” will not be streamed.)

All sessions are an hour long.

For the complete ONA09 schedule – as well as each session’s Twitter hashtags — please visit onaconference.org.

If you have any questions, please e-mail ONA09@journalists.org.

The 20 students will bring a rich, varied set of multimedia skills and fresh perspective to ONA09 coverage, which will appear on the conference Web site, ONAConference.org. Mentored by working journalists and journalism professors, they’ll cover people, events and issues using a range of digital formats and styles, including interactive text and graphics, live blogging, slideshows, audio and video.

Under the direction of Committee Chair Sara Kelly of National University, the students will be getting right to work. In the weeks leading up to ONA09, they’ll give attendees a comprehensive preview, including interviews with conference presenters and speakers and details on session topics.

The high overall quality of our applicants this year made the selection process particularly challenging. Chosen from applicants across the United States and Canada, they boast an impressive combination of professional experience and academic credentials.

ONA09 Student Newsroom

Arlinda Arriaga, University of North Texas
Arlinda Arriaga attends the University of North Texas, where she is a double major in journalism and political science with a minor in social sciences. Born and raised in Dallas, Arlinda is the first person in her family to go to college. Her portfolio presents a diverse range of experience in print, radio and online media. She previously interned for the Dallas Morning News, the Denton Record-Chronicle and Us Weekly. She spent the summer as a reporter covering the education and grassroots organizations beats at the Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.

Amanda Ash, University of British Columbia
Amanda Ash is a Master of Journalism student at the University of British Columbia. Arts and culture reporting is her area of specialization, but music journalism is her forte. Amanda currently freelances for the Vancouver Sun, CBC Radio 3, the Edmonton Journal, Exclaim! Magazine, NIGHTLIFE Magazine and The Block Magazine. She has also interned with CBC Radio 3 and the Victoria Times Colonist. Read her blog at www.theindiefiles.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at @AmandaAsh.

Devin Banerjee, Stanford University
Devin Banerjee is the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily, the daily newspaper serving Stanford University and the surrounding cities. He has also worked as a breaking news reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. Originally from the Los Angeles area, Banerjee has lived in the South Bay for the past two years.

Anna Bloom, University of California-Berkeley
Anna Bloom is entering her second and final year at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism after interning at MSNBC.com over the summer. Anna’s interest in pursuing multimedia reporting began when she launched the first video feature for the Park Record Newspaper in Park City, Utah in 2005. She is a very proud founding participant in UC Berkeley’s Ford Foundation Web sites, a project that endeavored to create six hyperlocal Bay Area news outlets online for the purposes of learning and exploring original ways to deliver the news to under-served communities.

Noah Buhayar, University of California-Berkeley
Noah Buhayar is a Oakland-based freelance reporter and multimedia producer. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, BNET and several other publications. In Fall 2008, he helped launch a Webby-award-winning ‘hyperlocal’ news site covering San Francisco’s Mission District. He is currently a candidate for a master’s in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.

Nick Burns, University of California-Berkeley
Nick Burns is a New York City- and San Francisco-based writer and reporter. Specializing in health, style and beauty writing, he has contributed to The New York Times, Cargo, GQ, Details, ELLE Accessories, POZ, Out, and many more. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Nick earned a degree in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He currently studies New Media at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Amanda Dyer, University of California-Berkeley
Amanda Dyer is a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, focusing on multimedia and radio reporting. Prior to attending journalism school she covered education for a small newspaper in California’s Central Valley. Since then, she’s interned at KQED FM and National Public Radio.

Armand Emamdjomeh, University of California-Berkeley
Armand Emamdjomeh is a photographer who’s been seduced by the potential of multimedia and the potential it offers for online storytelling. Before becoming a journalist, he worked in international disaster relief and development with field experience in the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. He has experience shooting throughout the Middle East, and is currently a multimedia reporter and photographer for the Webby Award-winning website missionlocal.org.

Isabel Esterman, University of California-Berkeley
Isabel Esterman is a freelance photojournalist and a graduate student in journalism and Asian studies at UC Berkeley who is trying to reconnect with her geeky side. She is particularly interested in human rights, the environment and technology in the developing world.

Jessica Estepa, University of Nevada, Reno
Jessica Estepa is a storyteller and a self-described news junkie/social media addict at the University of Nevada, Reno. To pay the bills, she is the multimedia editor at UNR’s Insight Magazine, a part-time reporter at the Reno Gazette-Journal and an editorial assistant at the Online Nevada Encyclopedia. She likes to think that after graduation, someone will hire her to do online journalism. But don’t worry, she has a back-up plan (hello, “American Idol”).

Nicole Fallek, Towson University
Nicole Fallek is a senior at Towson University in Maryland. She is majoring in mass communications and plans to use her writing, photography, graphic design, Web development skills and internship with Metromix Baltimore to prepare for a career in integrated digital media. Nicole is interested in exploring the role technology plays in communicating information and how a variety of different media can be combined to creatively communicate an idea.

Austin Fast, Miami (Ohio) University
Austin Fast is a senior at Miami (Ohio) University studying journalism and international studies. He just returned from a summer internship in Pristina, Kosovo with KosovaLive – Kosovo’s only independent news agency. At Miami, Fast is editor-in-chief of The Miami Student and a member of the Men’s Glee Club. While not copy-editing the newspaper, Fast likes people-watching at Oxford’s coffee shop, stargazing on clear nights and going on road trips with good friends. He is from Haviland, Ohio.

Lauren Gentile, American University
Lauren Gentile is a Communications major at American University in Washington D.C. As a freshman, Lauren landed an internship at the Washingtonpost.com. Her work at the Post enabled her to learn more about digital media and Web-based video content. This fall she will be working for the AU athletics department shooting, editing and promoting video highlights and interviews for their newly designed website. You can read her internship blog at asavvystart.wordpress.com or follow her on Twitter at @lkg20.

Melissa Hale, Towson University
Melissa Hale is a social media enthusiast with an eye toward online news coverage. She is a mass communications major at Towson University with a concentration in journalism and new media. She interned at The Baltimore Sun, where she acquired knowledge of today’s multimedia. View her online portfolio at melissaahale.com.

Kate Kilpatrick, University of California-Berkeley
Kate Kilpatrick is a second-year multimedia student at UC Berkeley who loves covering subcultures high and low — from Major League Baseball wives to Mexico City street clowns. Her writing has appeared in Philadelphia Weekly, The Washington Post, Fader, Black Book, and Dazed and Confused.

Martin Ricard, University of California-Berkeley
Martin Ricard is a reporter with a print background who is pursuing a master’s degree at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to become a multimedia reporter. His hobbies consist of Scrabble, listening to jazz and playing pool. He’s also been told he has an old soul, which he can’t argue with since he’ll gladly play an Outkast song one moment and Curtis Mayfield the next.

Abby Selden, Belmont University
Abby Selden is a senior journalism major and political science minor at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. She spent this past summer in New York City as an International Radio & Television Society (IRTS) Summer Fellow and interned with the PBS documentary series Wide Angle. Earlier this year, Abby completed an internship with WTVF News Channel 5 in Nashville and received two Videographer Awards, one Award of Distinction for her individual broadcast reporting compilation, and a second Award of Distinction for team video coverage of the 2008 presidential debate at Belmont University. She also won a 2009 Communicator Award for her individual reporting compilation. Abby regularly writes articles for the Nashville Mayor’s Homelessness Commission online newsletter, View from the Street. In 2008, she spent the summer as an editorial intern with Journal Communications Inc., in Franklin, Tenn., writing articles and editing online video, and spent the fall contributing to the CQPolitics.com election blog, The Report Card.

Juana Summers, University of Missouri
Juana Summers will graduate from the University of Missouri in December with dual degrees in Convergence Journalism and History. Most recently, Summers interned at the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas. She was a Chips Quinn Scholar in Summer 2009 and participated in the New York Times Journalism Institute and Institute on Political Journalism in 2008. Summers hopes to pursue a career in political reporting.

Suzanne Yada, San Jose State University
Suzanne Yada is a journalism and business student at San Jose State University. She was a copy editor for a Central Valley newspaper for three years before she returned to school, and she also served as editor-in-chief for two local independent publications. She is now a social media strategist and steering committee member of The Public Press, an independent nonprofit news organization in San Francisco. She blogs and tweets about the future of the journalism industry at suzanneyada.com and @suzanneyada.

Natalie Yemenidjian, Pierce College
Natalie Yemenidjian is a sophomore at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Calif. She has been the editor of the school paper and the school magazine, and will launch the school’s first Internet radio station in the spring. Yemenidjian has won awards for writing and reporting, editorial cartooning, page design and multimedia reporting from the Journalism Association of Community Colleges as well as from Pierce College’s Media Arts Department. Current TV viewers “picked for TV” her multimedia story “Esha, Dressed in White.” Yemenidjian has also written for a community newspaper of the Los Angeles Times and is a columnist and special section editor for the Los Feliz Ledger. She will transfer to a four-year college in Fall 2010.

The 2009 Conference and Awards Banquet, which marks ONA’s 10th anniversary, is expected to attract hundreds of online journalists from around the world for three days of training, panels and workshops on emerging trends, as well as a Career Summit and expanded Job Fair. Last year’s event in Washington, D.C. sold out.

“ONA’s conference is where journalism meets technology,” said ONA President Jonathan Dube, “and this year we’re especially looking forward to hearing from two people who are revolutionizing the way journalists do their jobs.”

Williams is the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, a social network where users answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. Begun as a side project less than three years ago, Twitter now reaches an estimated 5 million users and is ranked as a top social site. It is also being adopted as a reporting tool, with users filing everywhere from the Mumbai bombings to the Academy Awards’ red carpet. Williams also co-founded Blogger, a service for creating and managing blogs, and is credited with inventing the term “blogger.”

Stone is the CEO and co-founder of Blogher, an online community for women. Begun as a labor of love in 2005 as a conference for women bloggers, Blogher is now the number-one community of blogs by women, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub, and a publishing network of more than 2,700 blog affiliates. The former VP of Programming and editor-in-chief of Women.com, Stone has launched blog networks and interactive programming for Hearst, Rodale Magazines, Knight-Ridder Digital and Glam media. She is the first internet journalist awarded a Nieman Fellowship by Harvard University.

The Online News Association’s mission is to inspire innovation and excellence among journalists to better serve the public. The membership includes news writers, producers, designers, editors, bloggers, technologists, photographers and others who produce news for the Internet or other digital delivery systems, as well as academic members and others interested in the development of online journalism. ONA also administers the Online Journalism Awards.