Anthony Pesce

So I’ve been at the ACP/CMA conference a few days now, and there are definitely some great things happening here. Some of the workshops have been great, talking to WoodWing was great, and meeting some of my Twitter and CoPress friends has been great. But to be honest I feel like the conference organizers are stuck in 1995. There have been a few sessions that looked promissing, but they all required pre-registration and a special fee. There were also supposed to be a bunch of sessions from an Adobe rep about Photoshop, InDesign, etc… but they were all about CS3 (officially out of date) and the rep didn’t show up to a bunch of the classes. Booo.

I went to an interesting presentation from the lead photographer from the Lawrence Journal World, Mike Yoder, who talked generally about the necessity for participatory news. He spoke about some of the multimedia projects he’s been working on, the importance of quality audio, and the importance of receiving feedback and news from community sources. You can see a snippet of his talk on this YouTube video. For me he was one of the highlights, as well as the two keynotes so far — one I wrote about on PBS Idea Lab, and the other was my editor for Idea Lab Mark Glaser who is awesome.

Generally though, I’ve found many things at this conference a waste of my time. The networking has been good, and a few of the sessions have been useful, but the majority of the sessions (like 80%) I could have taught myself. I don’t really want to hear from other students unless it’s an open, roundtable discussion. If someone is going to teach me how to do something I would like to hear it from a professional, or at least from another editor of a college daily.

I’ve also found that a lot of people here are preaching multimedia and social media tools, but relatively few of the papers here are using those tools. So with all of the preaching, where is the practical knowledge? Where is the workshop on how to use a camera? Edit video? Where is the workshop that demonstrates the power of social media in breaking news and building a brand on campus? Where do we learn CSS and HTML? Where do we learn the damn skills we need people?

To be fair there were a few workshops that covered these topics, but not in the comprehensive fashion I would prefer, and most of them required the foresight to register and pay extra in advance to attend them. Most of the Adobe ones were useless because no one showed up to teach them. So a big group of students, some of whom I spoke to during a technology roundtable discussion, came to this conference and realized what they need to be learning — only to realize they couldn’t get into those sessions. Poor planning, I think.

I’m also not hearing or seeing any comprehensive effort to try to address these deficiencies. Many, many students have no idea what multimedia is or how to use it, let alone update their own websites. And the funniest part of all of this is that the professionals here, and generally in the journalism blogosphere, think we’re the future. If we’re supposed to be teaching all the old people about multimedia, who’s going to teach us! Seriously, people, I think that’s probably the biggest elephant in the room at this conference and it’s very frustrating.

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