Harry is a former public radio journalist who left that industry for Internet startups. He’s been CEO of three VC-backed startups and has heard [literally] hundreds of pitches while at Idealab, one of the country’s first technology business incubators. He’ll start us off by explaining the challenges and glories of entrepreneurship.

Watch a sneak-preview screening of selected clips from the upcoming feature documentary “A FRAGILE TRUST: Plagiarism, Power and Jayson Blair at The New York Times,” which will air nationally on PBS in May, 2014, as part of the award-winning series “Independent Lens.” A FRAGILE TRUST explores the nuances of this complex story about power, ethics, representation and accountability in the mainstream media. Discussions on ethics in the digital age and plagiarism prevention will follow.

The Internet and mobile devices have changed the way people listen and that has big implications for radio. In the age of Stitcher, Flipboard and SoundCloud, how do you get ahead of the rapid shift in listener habits? Make audio available anywhere and anyway people want to listen. This digital audio strategy has brought great change to the way we create audio content, produce it, manage it, archive it and package it for audiences. In this hands-on workshop for radio, audio and podcast professionals, we’ll share tips and tricks for creating, managing and monetizing syndicated digital audio. We’ll share what’s working, what isn’t, and offer practical solutions for audio content producers to put into action at their organization.

Every day we have increasing access to rich data sets that contain information about politics, our governments and the world around us. Journalists and media makers play an important role in providing contextual information and turning data into a narrative that people can understand. This session will explore efforts to collect, standardize and publish civic data, and how journalists can leverage each other’s work to tell the most important stories.

Kelly is still new to the startup space and Nadine has heard pitches from many would-be entrepreneurs. They’ll talk about what to do and where to go once you get off the ground.

The news article format isn’t dead, but it is for this session. How could you best convey news to your audience if you couldn’t write a traditional news article, that vestige of the 19th century print-only world? Join the staff from the new American Press Institute for an exercise in imagining story forms designed for the new landscape of devices and audience behaviors. We’ll brainstorm ideas not just for breaking news, but also trend stories and complex issues.

Join us to test-drive the most effective training modules and exercises to come out of the fellowship program run by The Internews in Kenya Data Journalism Dredger. In the program, six data journalism fellows will dedicate three months to learning how to produce health-related journalism with messy data and free tools that they can integrate into their day-to-day work back in their newsrooms. Topics include finding, scraping, cleaning, understanding, mapping and telling stories with data.

How do you know if you are working with the right people? NewU Co-Director Doug Mitchell asked Alli Joseph to be an equal partner on this project because their styles are different. But, that doesn’t work for everyone. What’s the secret to successful team building? Is there a secret?

Do I need a business plan? Will my friends work for free? I’ll make money from advertising, right? Is it better to work at a failed startup than to never have worked at one at all? We’ll answer your questions, too.

Here’s your chance to sit down with a group of business-side wizards from small- and medium-sized news organizations and ask them anything. (Questions will also be taken via social media.)

ONA will launch an Ethics and Standards Forum, led by AP’s Tom Kent, to tackle the increasingly complex issues journalists face. Standards and ethics are crossing new borders all the time. Within the newsroom, they’ve gone beyond the world of traditional journalists to involve app developers, data wranglers and others who weren’t born in the newsroom. Can new perspectives lead to new thinking? Across national borders, ethics vary from country to country. How transportable are ethics? A story or interactive may have been appropriate when it was created, but years later, should it still be online? We’ll discuss a wide range of ethical issues like these and others.

Like speed dating, except this is an exercise in describing you and your company and why you believe you are a winner in the areas of Passion, Money, Brains and People.

Hundreds of millions of new mobile users come online every year, with a huge appetite for news. But they don’t have iPads or high-bandwidth connections. Will they ever see your coverage? Learn who are the innovators and out-of-the-box thinkers from a range of disciplines who are thinking differently about how to extend the reach of journalism.

Wynton Marsalis describes jazz as “the art of managing change without losing the focus on substance.” Journalism is change, too, blending instinct and expertise, performance and conversation, improvisation and swing time all in a continuously changing environment. In this music-based conversation, we’ll use jazz and improvisation theories to reframe how we structure newsroom and audience relationships and build support for innovation.

The companies that were chosen to compete for seed funding will get a chance to practice their pitch for funding to some of our judges.

Alli will lead an exercise to help you come up with a brand slogan for your company and how you can explain yourself and your intentions in just a few, highly effective words.

New story formats are emerging for covering and presenting rapidly evolving stories in a simple stream of information. Newsrooms have been identifying new ways of leveraging user trends to deliver news in optimized formats. Story streams, topic pages and slow live blogging platforms are just some of the experiments with new article formats. Join journalists, researchers and product developers who have developed new tools, formats and editorial processes to address evolving narratives as they share and compare learnings.

Productive collaborations emerge from a win-win, no-holds-barred sharing of resources and capacities. The key is building trust. Learn from leaders who have managed successful collaborations on what works and what doesn’t and leave with the tools to optimize your next investigation.

Celebrated investigative journalist I.F. Stone got many of his best scoops by poring over public, but obscure, government records. Today, more government documents than ever are available online, FOIA requests routinely result in thousands of emails and massive leaks have become routine. It can be tricky to report on this quantity of material, but there are emerging tools. In this hands-on workshop, expert instructors will show you how to use three front-line document mining tools: DocumentCloud (upload, storage, search and publishing), Overview (automatically sort documents into topics) and Tabula (extract tables from PDFs). Come dive into our example document sets, or bring your own document overload problems.

Trolling is a favorite internet pastime for some, a full-time job for too many. Whether you’re a reporter sharing insights on Twitter or an editor monitoring your comments section, handling them can be a punishing task. But there’s social science data out there to help you understand, deal with and halt troll-like behavior.

This class will cover the basics of copyright law as background for a detailed discussion of fair use. We’ll talk about what content you can borrow from others and how to know when others are borrowing more content from you than fair use permits. We’ll dispel some common misconceptions about copyright, discuss how you can protect yourself against liability for user generated content, and give you practical tips on acquiring content and administering freelance contracts.

Yes, there is a difference between money from a VC, Angel investor or a Foundation. We’ll describe the difference and offer tips on deciding what’s best for your and your company.

Use the data you have about how readers/customers use your service to find new customers, and keep them coming back (aka user acquisition and retention).

With lessons from the morning’s Bringing Tech into the Classroom “Listen” session, participants will be led in groups to brainstorm and develop new classroom curricula.

What are the top high-level issues facing digital journalists? We’ll crowdsource your thoughts and challenge leaders in our industry — and candidates for the 2014 Online News Association Board of Directors — to share their reactions in three minutes or less, followed by your Q&A.

This class is designed to help you stay out of legal trouble (or a least go in with your eyes open). We’ll explain the basics of libel, privacy, and newsgathering tort liability and provide practical advice on managing newsroom risk. We’ll talk about subpoena compliance, media liability insurance, managing and moderating user submissions, and practicing journalism in the cloud.

Does it seem like all you do is pitch, pitch, pitch and no one hears you? We’ll offer some suggestions on how to become less a presenter and more of a conversationalist to potential investors.

10-20-30? Does that work? How much text should in put in a slide? What about embedded video or audio? None of the above? Come hear from an investor about what he looks for in a Pitch Deck.

Glass is here. Now what? How can you design a compelling news experience for Google’s first wearable device? What does it take to develop an app, or “glassware” for Glass? How can we use Glass to create original reporting? Join three Explorers — an entrepreneur/developer, a producer and a journalism educator — for a discussion about the future of journalism on wearable devices. And take your chance to try the new Watchup glassware. Right on your eyes.

This class will cover a broad range of business-side legal issues that you’ll want to be on top of if you’re involved in a digital news operation. We’ll cover ad sales, advertising compliance, ad substantiation; data collection, behavioral advertising, and privacy; branding, trademarks and domain names; email marketing; and promotions.

Competitively selected companies pitch for seed funding.
(This is a private session.)

So you want to start a non-profit news organization — but you’re not sure how to make the numbers work? We’re here to help. In this workshop format, we’ll walk you through financial strategies, from diversified funding streams to events and the best fundraising pitches (and people to ask).

What are the best techniques for quick, effective video gathering?

This hour-long workshop focuses on story shooting and strategy in the field. From raw video clips in breaking news scenarios to longform video storytelling, we show you techniques that can help you shoot compelling closeups, capture logical shot sequences, collect interviews and capture high quality audio.

You’ll walk away with tangible work flows, checklists and tools so that anyone with an iPhone, camcorder or RED 4K camera can come away with superior storytelling outcomes. We’ll also be discussing equipment requirements.

No prerequisites required. Come to the session, even if you’re totally new to video.

A lot of people concentrate on shooting when they take their first steps as video reporters. But fewer people put the same amount of effort into improving their editing skills. That can be to the detriment of a story: editing is where storytelling happens.

This hour-long workshop focuses on video story structure and fine editing. Learn how to organize your edits; how to structure your video pieces into scenes, action shots, narration and voice over and moments of reflection to tell a linear, visual story; and how to understand the role of rhythm and style in video editing.

We will also discuss the many options for editing, from Adobe Premiere to Final Cut to iMovie.

No prerequisites required. Come to the session, even if you’re totally new to video.