Drilling Down:

A daylong series of discussions exploring the latest developments in online publishing

When: Friday, May 4, 2007

Where: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 101 Elliott Avenue West, and Buckley’s at 232 1st Avenue West. Tel (206) 691-0232
Who’s invited: Professionals and students interested in digital media
Cost: Free for Online News Association $10 for non-members

RSVP: Limited to 60 participants.

Sign up by emailing Michelle Nicolosi
Please include your phone number and affiliation, and which of the sessions below you will attend.

Sponsors: Online News Association, MSNBC.com, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Society of Professional Journalists

Schedule:

10 a.m. – Welcome. Snacks, juice, coffee, water

Session 1 -- 10:15-11:15 a.m.
Discussion 1: Photo editing for the Web, slideshows, audio collection, video storytelling, video compression. Discussion leader Robert Hood, director of multimedia at MSNBC.com.
Discussion 2: Training and evangelizing for a legacy newsroom. Discussion leader Mark Briggs, editor of thenewstribune.com.

Session 2 -- 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Discussion 1: Ethical dilemmas with sales and advertising. Discussion leader Tom Brew, deputy editor/distribution, MSNBC.com.
Discussion 2: Social media rules, best practices. Discussion leader Michelle Nicolosi, assistant managing editor, Seattle P-I.

12:30-1:15 p.m. Pizza lunch from Pagliaccis
Speaker: Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, on civility and social networking from an entrepreneurial point of view.

Session 3 -- 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Discussion 1: Search engine optimization. Discussion leader pending.
Discussion 2: Experience from two local online-only news/entertainment sites, what it means for the future of online only news. Discussion leaders: Chuck Taylor from Crosscut.com, editors Liz and Dana from www.threeimaginarygirls.com

Session 4 -- 2:45-3:45 p.m.
Discussion 1: How to grow traffic on your site, from a technical and content viewpoint. Discussion leader Danny DeFreitas, deputy editor/sections of MSNBC.com.
Discussion 2: How to be a better beat blogger. Discussion leaders Todd Bishop and Monica Guzman of the Seattle P-I, David Postman of The Seattle Times.

Session 5 -- 4-5 p.m.
Discussion 1: Beyond UGC: How new Web tools allow people to make the news more relevant to themselves. Discussion leader Will Femia, community editor/blogger for MSNBC.com.
Discussion 2: What newspapers are doing wrong and how they can do it right. Discussion leader pending.

Session 6 – 5-5:30
Free for all. Some of the smartest local online publishing minds are all in one room. Throw out your burning questions. Maybe someone has an answer.

6 p.m.
Buckley’s for happy hour
Hosted by MSNBC.com

Discussion Leader Bios

Todd Bishop
Todd Bishop covers Microsoft and the software industry as a business and technology reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. For more than three years, he has written a blog about the company on SeattlePI.com. He worked previously at the Philadelphia Business Journal and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering a wide range of business topics. A graduate of CSU Chico's journalism program, he got his start in the industry in the Philadelphia Inquirer's two-year program for young journalists.

Tom Brew
Thomas Brew, deputy editor for distribution at MSNBC.com, left newspapers for online news in 1995. He worked at MSN News for nearly a year before the 1996 launch of MSNBC. Earlier, he'd spent 20 years at newspapers, the last 12 of them at the San Jose Mercury News, the first U.S. daily to publish online. In his youth, he worked as a reporter and editor at three Florida newspapers. Brew has a master's from the University of Florida and has taught at Santa Clara and Stanford universities.

Mark Briggs
Mark Briggs is the Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News at The News Tribune in Tacoma. He came to the paper in 2004 as the Strategy and Content Manager for Interactive Media, after spending four years at The Herald in Everett as New Media Director. He has written a book that will be published soon by J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism and the Knight New Media Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Titled "Journalism 2.0: A Guide for Journalists to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age," it will teach current and future journalists the skills they need to do better journalism with the help of digital technology.

Mike Davidson
Mike Davidson is founder and CEO of Seattle-based social news site Newsvine.com. Recently named one of Time Magazine's top 10 web sites of 2006 and serving over 500,000 unique visitors a month, Newsvine blends the best in mainstream news coverage with the contributions of more than 70,000 independent minds across the globe. Before co-founding Newsvine, Mike worked as Art Director and Manager of Media Product Development at both ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group and studied business at the University of Washington and Oxford.

Danny DeFreitas
Danny DeFreitas, Deputy Editor for sections of MSNBC.com, oversees six departments for the No. 1 TV news site on the Web – Business, Entertainment, Health, Sports, Travel and Technology & Science. DeFreitas joined MSNBC.com in July of 1995, arriving when Microsoft first launched MSN News on the internet. Prior to joining MSNBC.com, DeFreitas was the executive sports editor for the Contra Costa Times newspaper in Walnut Creek, Calif. DeFreitas also has served as a sports editor at the San Jose Mercury News and Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. A San Francisco Bay Area native, DeFreitas graduated from San Jose State University with a B.A. in Journalism.

Mónica Guzmán
Mónica Guzmán is a Hearst Newspapers Fellow and a columnist and blogger who writes about the Internet for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Mónica grew up with Instant Messenger and can't remember life before e-mail. Over the past two years, Mónica has worked day cops and general assignment for the Houston Chronicle and covered higher education and youth culture for the Midland Daily News in Midland, Mich., where she continues to write biweekly movie reviews. She graduated from Bowdoin College in May 2005 with a degree in sociology and film studies.

Robert Hood
Robert Hood is the Multimedia Director at msnbc.com. His team is responsible for photojournalism, audio and much of the original video reporting on the website. Before becoming the multimedia director, Hood worked as a multimedia producer at msnbc.com since 1996. He has also been a photojournalism and graphics management instructor at the University of Missouri - Columbia and a newspaper photographer in Wyoming and Utah.

Michelle Nicolosi
Michelle Nicolosi is an Assistant Managing Editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Nicolosi runs seattlepi.com, and was previously an investigative reporter at the Seattle P-I. Before that she was the editor of Online Journalism Review (www.ojr.org) and taught journalism at the University of Southern California. She has also worked as VP of biz dev at PersonalReader.com, as product manager at the idealab! company Hompage.com, and as a reporter at the Orange County Register, where she was a lead reporter on the Pulitzer Prize winning Fertility Fraud series. See her stuff at www.nicolosi.org, www.inserttexthere.com, www.onlinestorytelling.org

Chuck Taylor
Chuck Taylor, 49, is editor of Crosscut (www.crosscut.com), an online newspaper serving the Pacific Northwest from Seattle. He was reared in Michigan and Ohio. His first job was at the Tri-City Herald, where he worked as a reporter and editor from 1980-85. Taylor joined The Seattle Times in 1985 as the paper’s first newsroom graphic designer. He spent 16 years at The Times, working as a designer, editor, or reporter in four news departments. During the newspaper strike of 2000-01, Taylor founded and edited the Seattle Union Record, a newspaper and Web site published by striking staffers of The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. From 2002-06, he was managing editor of Seattle Weekly, the city’s leading alternative paper, overseeing news coverage and the paper’s evolving Web site. He joined Crosscut in late-2006.