Sessions at SND St. Louis on Saturday 1st October

How to maintain quality and ethical standards while juggling multiple deadlines and content demands for print, mobile, web and tablet. This session will focus on what errors readers notice most — and that you should focus on the most — and will include a discussion on online ethics vs. print.

Do you think the journalists coming out of j-school have skills you missed? There's a way to catch up. Learn about the new multimedia, social and mobile tools and how to incorporate them into your current job and life to experiment, grow and show off your abilities without spending a lot of money or excessive time.

This session will focus on the design hub consolidation at Gannett, Tribune, Scripps and Hearst, with leaders from each organization discussing what they’ve learned, what has worked, what didn’t and what the future holds.

This session will discuss practical and inspirational strategies on how to brainstorm, especially on deadline and with limited resources. Presenters will discuss their techniques, previous successes and inspiration for the first half, then in the second half will offer a real-live brainstorming throw-down with suggestions from the audience (a.la. Who’s Line Is It Anyway?”) and panelists working through the topic to prepare an plethora of creative ideas.

Three ingredients make up responsive web design: flexible grid-based layout, flexible images and media, and media queries. But these three elements are just focused on layout and layout is not design. “Design is the method of putting form and content together.” (Paul Rand) In the context of designing and prototyping BostonGlobe.com, we’ll talk about how we applied this technique to present news content, how we created the reader-experience and how a responsive framework affects:
story packaging and presentation on the web
art direction and ad delivery
the creative process
We’ll show some of the code (what makes the grid flexible, the images responsive, media queries, etc) as well as the static prototypes. We will offer insight to the ‘design-velopment’ process of rapid prototyping in code and illustration. We’ll show the logic behind how the content reflows at different browser-width breakpoints. We’ll we’ll talk about using custom fonts and fallback plans to better tailor content to users’ varying contexts, and methods for testing a ‘device-agnostic’ layout across a relatively exhaustive list of devices.

Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company, and a Partner in the Dachis Group, a social business consultancy. Dave’s time is spent researching, sketching and writing on innovation, design, systems thinking, and creativity in business, as well asspeaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.
His latest book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers details more than 80 tools and techniques used by the world’s leading innovators.
He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

The future’s bright for innovative news designers, you just have to be creative about reinventing your career path. Find out how from a panel of finalists from SND’s original “The Intern” competition. Five years ago they burst onto the scene as fresh-faced students hungry for their first internship. Today, they’re blazing trails at the country’s most influential media companies, running their own businesses and defining the jobs for the next generation.

Learn from the ground-breaking newsroom app teams at ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune in this survey course about how to get news apps in your newsroom. Learn how to gain the technology and skills needed to make for news apps and how to find allies in the newsrooms, corporate and IT to make it a success. There will be several projects dissected and a discussion of agile project management skills also.

Do you dream of creating interactive, data-rich maps? Learn the building blocks of data and GIS maps and how to join them online. See demonstrations of GeoCommons and MapPublisher — which allows you publish online and reuse in print. We'll cover some technical subjects (so be prepared to eat a little broccoli). This session is perfect those trying to find which size propeller hat to wear.

The craft of journalism is too often driven by the journalists themselves — by their own standards of what is important and worthy. Designers have long been the people in newsrooms speaking up for the near-mythical “audience” — asking questions about how to make content accessible, whether the main points of a story are clear and how readers will be encouraged to act on the information they’re given.

Why everything you learned in the newsroom will make you a better web designer
With digital news content being published on phones, tablets, and all sorts of other platforms, there’s an explosion of content on the web — and a serious need for experienced editorial designers to organize it all. The skills honed in newsrooms are more relevant than ever as readers demand better online experiences. Tito Bottitta & Mike Swartz will share stories and practical advice about how they learned this for themselves while launching Upstatement, their web design firm, and designing the new BostonGlobe.com website.

From the travel section to deep investigative reporting, news organizations around the country are using comics to engage audiences and tell stories that are immersive, personal, and deeply effective. Graphic journalism seamlessly blends storytelling with images in a way that even the best photographs can't do, and it's less expensive than most multimedia. During this session, we'll discuss best practices for creating graphic journalism with artists and editors working in the field. We'll talk about what works, what doesn't, and what tomorrow's biggest opportunities are.

This session will discuss new tools available that are allowing organizations to mirror both their print and digital projects. No longer shackled by 'Web-safe' fonts, @font-face, TypeKit and the Google Font API are allowing a breath of fresh air in our text voices. Panelists will discuss techniques, trends and what the future likes for fonts.

As cities increase their focus on improving the urban environment, how can journalism help citizens shape the community in which they live? Alissa Walker, an L.A. based writer who writes about architecture, design and urban issues, is experimenting with ways to use journalism to activate and empower local residents. This year, at the publication GOOD, Alissa helped launch GOOD LA, the first chapter of a new initiative called GOOD Local, which focuses on not only providing great local content, but also on giving readers the tools to take action for the causes they believe in, and provide real-life opportunities to engage with each other. In her role as editor, Alissa has created crowd-sourced projects, community events, and service opportunities that create impact on a local level and add value to the GOOD experience, producing more loyal and active readers. Journalists don’t need to work within the context of a publication to make the same impact in their cities. On a personal level, Alissa gave up her car a few years ago (Yes! In L.A.! It’s possible!) and uses tools like her personal blog, Facebook and Twitter to engage her readers around local public transit issues. This can include anything from taking photos of herself walking to prove that people walk in L.A., posting updates to Twitter about riding the bus, to organizing urban hikes and tours, and writing about biking in L.A. to help women feel safer about getting on a bike.

If you missed Karl in Denver, we’ve brought him back to expand on his ever-growing list of free online software for generating visualizations of all sorts: GIS maps, graphs, timelines, slideshows, animations, collages and the like. Also, if you don’t feel like buying the Adobe Suite, there is really good open-source software that can do layout and design, draw, manipulate photos, edit movies and more. Karl will help you sort through the mass of them and let you know the best ones to use to help visualize your stories by giving you an overview of the capabilities of each. Attendees are also welcome to share any free software that they like to use.

An exciting close to the SND St. Louis conference with awards, fancy clothes, a dinner and a bunch of surprised, hosted by Tim Harrower.