AAJA Conference Call: Journalism Beyond the Traditional Newsroom

updated Jan. 16, 2009

AAJA has rescheduled the conference call "Journalism Beyond the Traditional Newsroom" for Thursday Jan. 22. Due to technical problems at our hosting service BlogTalkRadio, the Jan. 14 call was cancelled shortly after it began. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you can join us again for this session on reinventing journalism careers.

Thurs., Jan. 22, 2009
Noon Pacific (3 p.m. Eastern)

While jobs at newspapers and news stations are shrinking, the doors to self-publishing online are wide open. Journalists have reinvented their careers on Web-only news platforms. Find out how they did it in a discussion with Dean Takahashi, writer for VentureBeat and former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News; Jane Ellen Stevens, a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute developing a news site incubator; Calvin Tang, founder of Newsvine; Tracy Record, a former assistant news director for KCPQ-TV who started the West Seattle Blog; and moderator Joe Grimm, a visiting journalist at Michigan State University School of Journalism

The panel discussion will be followed by Q&A with callers. We invited members to call in and share ideas.

RSVP to national@aaja.org and the call number will be sent to you.

Dean Takahashi is a writer for VentureBeat, www.venturebeat.com. Prior to his current job, he was the Tech Talk Columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, where he wrote gadget reviews and opinion pieces on technology in Silicon Valley. He also wrote the Dean & Nooch on Gaming and Tech Talk blogs and did a regular video podcast on gaming. He has been a journalist for 20 years, most of it covering technology business news. Before he joined the Mercury News in 2002, he was a senior writer at Red Herring magazine from 2000 to 2002. Before that, he was a staff writer in the San Francisco office of the Wall Street Journal from 1996 to 2000. His first job at the Mercury News was as a chip industry reporter from 1994 to 1996. Before that, he worked at the Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition, the Orange County Register, and the Dallas Times Herald. He has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University (1987) and a bachelor's degree in English from UC Berkeley (1986). He is the author of two books, "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked," published in 2006, and "Opening the Xbox," published in 2002.

Jane Ellen Stevens, a freelance multimedia journalist, is currently a Fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University Missouri. She's also an associate faculty member at the Knight Digital Media Center at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and a consultant for news organizations that are making the transition to Web-centric journalism . She's worked for the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, and founded a syndicated science and technology feature service with clients that included the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, and Asahi Shimbun's AERA Magazine. She's written for magazines, including National Geographic, and worked for New York Times Television as a videojournalist. She did multimedia reporting for several Web sites, including Discovery Channel and MSNBC.com. As part of her fellowship, she is developing a news organization incubator, called the RJI Collaboratory, and a prototype local health site.

Tracy Record is co-publisher and editor of the West Seattle Blog, www.westseattleblog.com. She has worked to hunt, gather, process, analyze, and share information in a multitude of media pretty much around the clock since age 17. Most recently, she was assistant news director at KCPQ-TV in Seattle, a position she resigned in December 2007 to work on projects as a full-time independent journalist, writer, and editor with WSB as Priority Project #1. Before that, Tracy spent two years with the Walt Disney Internet Group in roles including executive producer of ABCNEWS.com. That followed eight years at KOMO-TV, where she left as its first-ever executive producer of new media. Before that: TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations in California, Nevada, and Colorado, and three Emmy Awards along the way.