Journalists packed City College of San Francisco on April 24 for our first “Spring Training for Journalists,” a daylong workshop we hope will become an annual tradition for news staffers, freelancers and students throughout our region.

This year’s offering, “Reinventing Your Career,” covered the job and technology skills demanded by a fast-changing news profession. Top-flight instructors ran seminars on topics such as entry-level multimedia, audio production basics and working with interpreters to report on underserved communities.

Admission was free to all dues-paying Guild members, including those working at BANG newspapers and members of our freelance unit.

Journalists packed the session “Driving Web Traffic,” led by Wired.com Science Editor Betsy Mason and Knight Digital Media Center Webmaster and Scot Hacker, which outlined how social networking and HTML coding can be used to help build an online audience.

They raved about the concise and funny instruction of former Chronicle staffer Kim Komenich, a longtime photojournalist who now teaches multimedia at San Jose State. Komenich gave a whirlwind introduction to producing “Multimedia on the Cheap,” showing how journalists can experiment with new forms of storytelling, even if they or their newsrooms lack the funds to make a major investment in equipment and software.

And they took notes as keynote speaker Davia Nelson, half of the award-winning NPR documentary duo, “the Kitchen Sisters,” showed how lowering a microphone down to chest level can help put an interview subject at ease.

Steve Fainaru, who won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on military contractors in Iraq, kicked off the day by explaining why he gave up his gig at the Washington Post to take on a radically different assignment: managing editor in charge of news at the Bay Citizen, the nonprofit startup the Guild helped to create in the interest of quality journalism.

Former San Francisco Chronicle staffer Kim Komenich, a longtime photojournalist and Pulitzer winner who now teaches multimedia at San Jose State, gave some funny and concise advice on multimedia.

Organized by California Media Workers, the training event was cosponsored by the City College of San Francisco Journalism Department and the Bay Area Media Training Consortium, or BAMTC. A partnership of the Bay Area Video Coalition, California Media Workers, NOVA and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, BAMTC is seeking grants to form a virtual “one stop” career transition network for more than 700 Bay Area journalists.