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.

(more…)

Jan. 22: After months of largely theoretical existence, the nonprofit Bay Area News Project leapt toward reality this week by announcing the hiring of its top leaders: CEO Lisa Frazier and Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Weber.

Following the exit of founder partner KQED from the project, the group also said it will  supply stories to the new Bay Area sections of the New York Times.

Frazier, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., began helping structure the Bay Area News Project last spring, after San Francisco financier Warren Hellman pledged a $5 million seed grant.

Weber is perhaps best known in the Bay Area as the founder of The Industry Standard, a dot-com era magazine famous for its generous salaries and extravagant rooftop parties.

Read more about them here.

By Josh Richman:

MY BABY, SHE WROTE ME A LETTER:

By now many of you have received and read a letter from John Armstrong and
Kevin Keane explaining why it’s “unfortunate” that the “National Newspaper Guild”
is organizing our newsrooms. Ready, set… dissect! (more…)