inluminent

The last day of Connections was really just more of the stuff you’ve read in my past two accounts of my experiences at the conference.

I attended fewer sessions on Day Three than I did during the other two days, I think mainly because I realized (or percieved) that I wasn’t really getting anything out of the sessions. The two sessions I did attend on day three really were worth attending though. I attended the Buzz Sessions meetings and a one entitled Registration Revisited. I also spent time meeting with vendors, other online newspaper people from similar markets and clients. This third day was much more enjoyable and productive than the first two…

Buzz Sessions: The Buzz Sessions were five small group discussions with topics like Print to Web (taking newspaper display ads and putting them online), Creating spanish-language websites, Essential website redesign, Multimedia (and how to use it), and one other topic (that I can’t remember). I sat in on two of the five little groups: Print to Web and Multimedia. Both were great little discussions. The overall thing I take away from the meeting was that newspapers are really trying to figure out how to use the distribution channel that the internet is as a way to really transform themselves from just ‘printed newspaper companies’ into ‘content and delivery’ companies. Every size and every shape of newspaper was represented in these buzz sessions and a lot of great sharing took place. On the topic of Multimedia, there are some really cool things going on out there, if you take notice… For example, when SignOnSanDiego.com was putting pictures and movies of the wild-fires that afflicted Southern California this summer… did you know that they found cell-phone camera phones the easiest and most manageable technology solution for getting that content back to the newsroom for production and posting online? Not some $20,000 or $100,000 video set-up. A bunch of stupid $200 cell-phones with cameras built into them and an army of folks to go take pictures. That ingenuity and creativity in this space really amazes me sometimes… cell-phone camera based movies… such a simple solution for web-ready video…

Registration Revisited: Wow! Great presentation and by far the most attended and interesting discussion throughout all of Connections. We heard from Belo Interactive, Tribune Interactive and the Arizona Republic’s online folks… Belo and Tribune are truly leaders in the online registration field. AZCentral just launched ‘lite registration’ last September. Belo and TI have been at it for 4 and 3 years respectively. Belo and TI are just now starting to be able to monetize their registration data effectively for advertisers (and are starting to try and figure out how to use their registration to serve their users/online readers). AZCentral is also just starting to sell advertising based on their registration data. The overall feeling I get coming out of the session was that registration is coming to a newspaper site near you soon. If you’re local news site doesn’t require registration today, trust me when I say that they’re thinking very hard about doing it. Very hard… all of them. And when newspapers do it, I can tell you that TV, radio, and almost all other news-content websites will start following. The leaders are doing it. Their readers aren’t complaining at all (100 complaints in 1.6 Million registrations in Arizona isn’t complaining). It’s coming folks. And I dare say paid premium content online is coming next… It’s already here in some local news markets.

I didn’t attend the presentation on The Transformation of Advertising, though I wanted to. I heard that it was all about how TV is going to change… the person that told me that also said that 99% of the presentation had very little to do with that newspaper companies can do to affect TV advertisers… I guess I’m glad I didn’t go to that one…

I met a lot of great people at Connections, but overall I’m coming away slightly disappointed. My company spent a lot of money to send me out to this conference. I invested a lot of time that could have been spent in front of clients. I expected to really get to learn a lot at this conference, but, in the words of a peer “everything we talked about was ‘old-hat’”. I sat next to the marketing director of a small paper in Arkansas on the way home, and she was very disappointed too. In her words the conference was “more form that substance”.

Will I go to next year’s Connections? Yes, most likely, but only because it’s in Dallas, and I can turn it into a week-long trip to visit clients, not because I think I’ll get anything out of the conference. Can I do something to make the conference better for all attending by joining the planning committees? Sure, I think I could, but do I want to? Don’t know the answer to that.