How to get the most out of this toolkit
Welcome to the after-party.
You go to a great event, probably hosted by OpenNews in some way, and spent the week or weekend surrounded by excitement and passion and innovation and ideas and you’re ready to bring it back to your newsroom. So now what?
This set of resources is designed to help journalists bring three types of learning back to their newsrooms after a big event. There is no single, correct way to use this toolkit. Some people will want to use all of the resources we’ve developed, others may need just one or two exercises.
The three main areas are:
- Personal practice: or how do you inform your everyday work with what you learned? This could be as simple as a few story ideas you scribbled down on a napkin or as complex as acquiring a totally new skillset.
- Skillsharing: how do you expand beyond your own practice and spread this knowledge throughout your entire news organization? These resources will focus on how to host trainings and skillsharing sessions with your team.
- Tough conversations: how to pitch a significant change to your executive or leadership team. Maybe you came back and realized your company’s hiring practices are more exclusionary than they should be. Or maybe you learned a cool new workflow that you’d like to try and implement. Either way, you will need to structure your pitch and make it persuasive.
Conferences and journalism events can have a huge impact on a newsroom, even from sending a single employee! Chances are, if your company sent you to such an event, they’re looking to maximize on their returns. The resources that follow are meant to help you organize your thoughts and notes, share what you’ve learned, and help create meaningful change and innovation.
Who is this guide for?
- This guide is for anyone working in a newsroom who has attended a community event (like a conference, workshop or other type of convening or training).
- This set of resources is intended for journalists and technologists at any stage in their career, with any level of seniority in their organization.
- This package is for reporters, editors, photographers, product managers, videographers, engineers, coders, and more, who can all work to make use of the exercises and articles that follow to improve their own work as well as the work of their colleagues and organization.
What should I do next?
- Assuming you know what your next big event is, take a few minutes and set some goals for yourself based on the schedule of sessions.
- Enjoy your event! Take good notes (sketchnotes, digital notes, even pen and paper notes!), save tweets with great resources you want to come back to, collect business cards, and so on.
- After your event, decide whether you want to work on improving your own work, sharing with your colleagues, or pushing for a larger institutional change. Then dive in!
This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by Emma Carew Grovum. It’s meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we’d love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here.
We’d also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, let us know!