Session Transcripts

A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all.

Closing Session

Day & Time: Friday, 5:30-6pm

Room: Memorial

Thanks, Marty. He’s on it. Thanks, everyone. SRCCON is over. I’m sorry.

Boo!

Thank you all for sticking it through and for doing amazing stuff. We have just a couple of final thoughts here and then we’ll send you out into a beautiful midwestern summer night. First off, just a couple of thanks here. A-1, thank you so much to the volunteers who have worked incredibly hard for the last couple of days to make all of this come together as seamlessly and as smoothly as they have. Many of whom who flew here on their own dime. Thank you to the amazing staff here at the McNamara Center who have worked really hard and welcomed us into not only what’s an incredibly beautiful space but also a working space. There are people who we’ve been in the middle of their walk to and from their offices in the last couple of days. So really, thank you to all of them. Thanks, of course to the people that make OpenNews possible, which makes SRCCON possible, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla, they have been tireless supporters of the work that we do. And most importantly, thanks to all of you for participating and for sharing and for really bringing it for the last two days. One note on sharing. Many of I brought coffees and teas and other things, and swag, and Magic Cards, and D&D dice but there’s sort of the swag table where you picked up your lanyards originally, some leftovers but also the coffees and teas. So if you brought something, take something home. We have a couple of final thoughts about how to keep this going throughout the year. And I want to grab Erika to talk a lot more about that.

Hello. So one of the ways that we’re excited to keep in touch throughout the year is through community calls, which are these biweekly, collaborative conference calls that OpenNews hosts and many of you have been involved with them over the year. And it’s a place for people to talk about projects, events, opportunities, things going on in this space. A lot of the same kinds of discussions, and tools, and demos and talk topics that we’ve had over the last couple of days. We talk for about 45 minutes every other week on a conference call line. So it’s a great way for you all to share and to stay in the know-Ohio in the community and it’s also a way for put OpenNews to stay in the community throughout the year and one of the things that’s going on right now is we have the open application for the fellowship program. You may have met some of our current fellows, and there are numerous alumni in the room. And we’re excited to hear from our applicants. The application is open until August 21st. You get to work with great news organizations, many of those news organizations, who have hosted fellows in the past and who are planning to host them in the future are in this room as well. So you should also check out. And community calls to learn more about the fellowship, so you can get more of the details straight from the fellows, as well. So the next call is coming up on July 8th. We’ll send more information in the follow-up emails but it’s a great way to keep sort of these conversations going over the year. And also, looking ahead to what you’ll be doing after we all leave this room or after we’re ushered out of this room, we just want to take a couple of minutes and if you want to think about what’s one thing you’re walking out of here today thinking about and how you want to share it? So if you want to think about that, turn to the person next to you, we just wanted to give you two minutes so kind of share what that one thing that you’re really walking away with is, and how you’re thinking about sharing it outside of this room.

[ Group Discussion ]

All right. I’m going to ask you to focus back up here for just a second. So back in what kind of feels like another lifetime, I actually taught in a journalism department at a college. And one of the things that you have to do when you’re a tenure track professor is teach not only the classes they hired you for, but also the ones that you’re grossly unqualified to teach like introduction to journalism. And one day we were doing an intro to journalism class and it was a day that was about journalism ethics and I had brought in a bunch of speakers and it—it was one of those classes that you do and you walk out and you’re like, “I nailed this. Like, these kids are going to be the best journalists that they can possibly be. I did this.” And I did this in one of those big journalism departments that has a big-screened TV with CNN playing on it. And we walk out of this class and everyone is glowing in this haze of how wonderful journalism is and on the screen is wall-to-wall coverage of the Balloon Boy and it was this moment where I just, like, I really did feel like we had lost.

Everything that I—there was this huge crowd of kids around it, you know. They were just soaking it all in, and it just, everything that they had just heard fell out of their heads. And I was thinking about that moment today, which has been a pretty remarkable day. Just, one news story after another has rolled and rolled like waves cresting on each other and here we all have been together on what is an incredibly momentous day, you know? And we’re all here helping to reshape and revitalize journalism on a day that you couldn’t ask for more reasons for why what we do is so important.

You know, today doesn’t feel like we’ve lost. You know, today, feels like anything is possible. And that’s because the work that you do is vital. And the way that you do it together is the thing that is going to truly make it survive and surpass the journalism that has come before.

So really, and truly, you know, we—there was a great moment when Erika asked everyone to share with their neighbor where, there was total dead silence in the room and then you realized, like, oh, wait, they’re serious. Okay. And then you started talking and then you wouldn’t stop. And we are serious. We really do want you this sharing to continue. We know that this work that we do only works when we share it. You know, only works when we go far outside this room with what we’ve learned from each other and we support each other and we open source our code and we make sure that all of this stuff gets out as far as it can, the same way that we want the news that we’re reporting reach the people that need it the most. We want this work as well and so we really want you to share. We want you to keep the connections that you’ve made over the last couple of days. We want you to keep going, to keep building and and to keep being amazing. So thank you all for just an incredible two days. There are celebrations as we speak, across the Twin Cities and across America. Go and enjoy them and just have a wonderful evening and safe travels everywhere. And we’ll see you next year in a city that we don’t yet, but absolutely in the summertime and we’ll have another amazing SRCCON. Thank you all.

[ Applause ]