Mark your calendars now for the April 15 -16 SPJ Region 9 Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico!
SPJ Rio Grande and the University of New Mexico student chapter will be hosting the regional conference in the Land of Enchantment.
The two-day event will include speakers Robert Hernandez and Fred Brown, and will feature a variety of panels and workshops including: digital security, covering elections, crunching numbers, “backpack journalism” and multimedia, covering the environment and Indian Country, diversity – and much more!
The conference will be held at the University of New Mexico. The event hotel is Hotel Parq Central (which includes free shuttle service and free breakfast). When making your hotel reservations, be sure to mention SPJ to get the group rate.
Follow this link to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spj-region-9-conference-tickets-21018198999
SPJ Rio Grande has reserved space on several of its panels, so if you feel you could help guide the conversation, reach out directly to organizer Laura Paskus at laura.paskus@gmail.com.
The conference schedule is listed below:
Friday, April 15
2:30
Registration
3:00
Digital Security: Journalists may pride themselves on protecting their sources but we leave them vulnerable every day with outdated digital security practices. Whether you’re covering national security for a major news organization or law enforcement in a small town, you should equip yourself with privacy tools for the age of StingRays and cell phone metadata. In this session, Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will provide a crash course on digital security to keep journalists and their sources safe.
4:00
Covering Elections:
2016 Political TV Ad Tracker: Nancy Watzman of The Internet Archive. This Knight-funded project uses audio fingerprinting to deliver data on how often political ads air, on what stations, in what states, etc.
Crunching the numbers: Sandra Fish on tracking data in your state with a review of tip sheets on Money in Politics, New Story Ideas, Politician Interviews and Covering Polls and Surveys.
Saturday, April 16
8:00
Registration and breakfast
9:00
Introduction by Fred Brown, former national SPJ president and key player in new SPJ Ethics Code.
Panel: Telling the Untold Stories: Bringing diverse voices into your coverage
Whose stories aren’t being told in your coverage? The session focuses on identifying the sources we don’t hear from in our newsrooms’ work, and creating an action plan for bringing those sources into our coverage. This is a hands-on workshop session with lots of interaction among attendees. Participants will leave with great sources for their organizations to reach out to and a game plan for how they’ll do it.
Panel: Multi-Media, Crossover, and Backpack Journalism
In today’s journalism world, reporters can no longer survive without multiple skills across platforms. But how can writers take photos that aren’t horrible? Television producers write great copy for the web? And all of us take video footage that doesn’t make people nauseous? SPJ’s regional experts on multimedia and backpack journalism share their tips.
Keynote speaker: Robert Hernandez / Lunch / Mark of Excellence awards
Covering Poverty
Co-sponsored with UNITY
New Mexico remains one of the poorest states in the nation and it is showing no signs of changing. From reservation life to rural Hispanic villages, the conditions, poor schooling and the lack of services seem to foster a repeating structure. What are we missing? How can we do a better job at coverage? How can we avoid poverty porn in our coverage? This panel will have journalists, activists and some politicians from both parties.
Panel: Covering the Environment in Native Communities
The Gold King Mine Spill had a significant impact on farmers and ranchers on the Navajo Nation, but that event was one of hundreds of potential environmental stories last year in Indian Country. Leaders in Native communities are using both traditional knowledge and innovations in technology to respond to environmental concerns and climate change. In this session, Native reporters and other journalists with extensive experience covering tribes in New Mexico will share advice and ideas for covering the environment in Indian Country.
Panel: Challenges for College Journalists
Is your campus news keeping up with user demand? How are you adapting to new platforms and competition for student attention? What constraints are impinging upon your journalism? We are crowd sourcing our list of challenges to be discussed; we’ll complete that list in the weeks leading up to the conference. [Please provide your thoughts to UNM Professor Mike Marcotte (mm@mikemarcotte.com).] Our panel will feature a college newspaper editor, media advisor, writing coach and a recent grad who’s gone pro.
Panel: Cops and Criminal Justice
The public’s relationship with law enforcement has undergone a fundamental shift during the past couple of years, with increased awareness of excessive force, police shootings captured on video and a growing number of federal investigations of police departments around the country. As journalists, we have an important duty to hold accountable individual officers and the systems in which they operate – for there is no more plain expression of state power than a police officer with a gun, a badge and the legal authority to use the power of both in an incredibly personal way. Further, police officers are asked increasingly to deal with some of society’s larger problems – addiction, mental illness, etc. – even though they are ill-equipped to the task, reform advocates say. Covering these issues is complicated and difficult for journalists, because law enforcement often is a more closed society than other areas of government. This panel will explore strategies that have and have not worked in telling these important stories.
Panel: How To Report On Solutions
When you report on a problem in your community, do you offer potential solutions? We end our regional conference with an introduction to new approaches from organizations like the Solutions Journalism Network and Images of Voices and Hope, which trains journalists in a “restorative narrative” model of reporting. We present the opportunities and challenges in these models and tell you where you can go to find resources and training.
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