Editor’s note: Lee Oglesby has been interning with the Knight Communications department this summer. Today is her last day. This post concerns the UNITY Convention, which was held last week in Chicago. Knight is a sponsor of the event.

The four days of workshops at UNITY 2008 Convention may have changed my mind a bit about new tools for journalism. The theme of the conference this year was “A new journalism for a changing world” so, naturally, everyone was anxious to discuss their ideas for the future of journalism in ways that would actually work right now.

I went to two sessions that were particularly influential for me. The first was hosted by Knight’s own J-Lab and brought together a panel of people who had worked with citizen journalism projects and knew the ins and outs.

Citizen media, for them, could mean a woman in Somalia sending a news lead to a BBC correspondent in London. It could also mean a student journalist gaining real-world experience by reporting on an event in a neighborhood near his school. But all forms of participatory media are ways of connecting professional journalists with citizens who could help them build a better story. Framing the concept for me that way (instead of theorizing about questionable people off the street writing stories for the paper) made it easier to understand.

The other session I attended was hosted by KYW NewsRadio and was designed to teach newspaper journalists how to write for radio. On the outside, it was just a workshop, but I got more from it.

The session reminded me that, although newspapers may be doing badly, media in the form of radio and television is doing just fine. Inevitably, during the question and answer portion of the session, a member of the audience brought up the growing field of online media and how radio was handling it. Their answer was typical of those I had heard from other Unity attendees: their hearts are still in radio (or television, or print media), but the Web site provides information that they can’t include in the limited space for each story.

So I leave Unity with a positive outlook towards my (possible) future in journalism. The journalism world won’t be completely detached from the one I grew up with, but it will be enhanced by digital media. The people behind the innovations know what they’re doing and know how to maintain integrity, even if the experiments fail.

Editor’s note: Lee Oglesby interns with the Knight Communications department this summer. This post is from the day before the UNITY Conference, which goes all this week in Chicago. Knight is a sponsor of the conference, and convened all journalism grantees on Tuesday to discuss media innovation.

A few of the presentations at Knight’s Journalism Grantee Meeting here in Chicago Tuesday gave me some interesting ways to think about journalism in the digital era and the role I play as a reader.

Knight Chair Rosental Alves talked about the deconstruction of the print newspaper, and stressed that this was not synonymous with the decline of journalism. That theme presented itself throughout the room yesterday. I’m certain I’ll see it several times during the Unity Conference this week. I almost expect to see T-shirts that read “Journalism is Not Dead!”

Dianne Lynch, 2007 News Challenge winner, also used her presentation to stress the need to focus on the goal and not the medium, but she brought up some crucial points. One of these was that new media is not always journalism. Most times, it’s people using their Facebook to tell friends that The Dark Knight was awesome.

Dianne also mentioned that the audience of innovators and journalists present in the meeting Tuesday (and at Unity for the rest of the week) are the “early adopters” of this new media. They’re ahead of the curve, but their readers are still behind and are likely to be a little more skeptical.

I’m not (yet) a digital innovator and I’m not a professional journalist. I’m a reader, and I have my doubts. For me, the most reliable news source is a print newspaper or an NPR station, This week, as I explore Unity, I’ll look for things that will encourage me to embrace the digital age and accept it as journalism.

If you can change my mind about digital journalism, I’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment.

This week, USC’s Knight Digital Media Center convenes their annual leadership conference in Los Angeles. Michele McLellen is liveblogging the week’s events; to begin, start with her initial explanatory post:

The top editor and the top online editor from each of 12 traditionally print organizations get together Tuesday-Friday with experts in digital journalism, technology and innovation. We hope each team will leave with a plan of next steps to take their organizations forward online.

In other posts:

Michele’s thoughts about recent trends in newsroom reorganization, culture, systems and processes, staff cuts, and technology,

Amy Mitchell’s (Deputy Director for the Project of Excellence in Journalism) overview of news audiences, including her point that “The user is NOT becoming the reporter,”

Krisztine “Z” Holly’s (Vice Provost for Innovation and Executive Director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation) seven myths of innovation,

Jeffrey Cole (USC Center for the Digital Future) on television and the importance of video,

Dana Chinn (USC Annenberg School for Communication) on web metrics (hint: move beyond “time spent” by site visitors and spikes),

and Nora Paul (Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota) on the importance of good design.

The conference blog feed is here, and the event continues through Friday.

The 2007 and 2008 winners of the News Challenge (the Knight contest to fund projects about the future of local news delivery) are gathered this week at MIT to hear about each other’s work, including the many projects at MIT.

Last night, there were twenty or so demonstrations of current work from MIT students. Below, video from Benjamin Mako Hill on Selectricity and Christina of the extrACT project.

This afternoon there were multiple options for locative gaming in Cambridge, a game workshop at MIT, and sessions around issues like finding technical developers for projects.

To follow along, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser is liveblogging the conference.

More conference blog posts are on Idea Lab, the group blog for all News Challenge winners that began last year and is updated with entries daily.

Persephone Miel also liveblogged today’s sessions here.

You can also join the Facebook group, look for images on Flickr (a popular online photo-sharing site) and Twitter (a microblogging site) with the tag #futurecivic (for Twitter #futurecivic tagging, try Summize). The Flickr pool of photos is here.

And, there’s the conference wiki, site, and the back channel from last night’s panel session.

This week, Trabian Shorters, V.P. of Communities at Knight Foundation, and I attended the NetSquared conference in San Jose, California. (Knight Foundation was a conference sponsor.)

In its third year, the NetSquared conference tightly programs two days of sessions on how to use social media tools like Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service, along with the real draw: twenty-one project presentations competing to be voted into the top three, with award money and the prestige of “winning” NetSquared.

The twenty-one projects are organized into broadly thematic panels (mapping, aggregation tools), and trends this year included specific asks to extend existing sites and databases with geolocative details, mobile interfaces, and formatted public data.

Most impressively, between sessions and in the hallways, conversation exploded. Presenting to an audience of their peers, the panelists fielded smart questions and excitedly announced finding technical help, calling out other conference attendees and thanking them. After panels, longer and more technical conversations often continued into the hack room, which became the Second Life Mixed Reality event on the second day.

This is a video I took between sessions and between conversations:

Bravo to the NetSquared team for creating a brief incubation of sorts where all projects could hone their ideas and grow from the interested and invested community gathered.

For more, see the conference agenda, blog entries, Twitter account.

Last Wednesday, the Knight News Challenge winners were announced at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive conference in Las Vegas.

Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen chatted with one of the winners, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, after the announcement; inventor of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is working with Martin Moore on a transparent journalism project.

The full details on all sixteen grants are here.

Video from all the winners explaining their projects, as Bev Clark does for her Freedom Fone project below, will be posted on this blog this week.

This year’s winners will also join last year’s News Challenge winners blogging for IdeaLab.

Fans of the News Challenge and these projects can join the News Challenge Ning social network to interact with the winners.