Heading This Week To The Knight Foundation's Future of News and Civic Media Conference

[Chris O'Brien]

I'm already counting down the hours until the Future of News and Civic Media Conference kicks off on Wednesday. Based at MIT, the conference brings together past winners of the Knight News Challenge grant program along with the new class that will be announced Wednesday. The Next Newsroom Project was a 2007 winner.

You can check out the agenda here. The first day is mostly going to be introductions, presentations, and the big announcement of the 2009 winners.

The next two-days will be held Barcamp style with attendees mapping out the sessions. It's a pretty exciting group of folks planning to attend and no doubt there will be lots of great ideas and plenty of inspiration, something we need in volumes these days.

I don't think there are any plans to live stream. But you can follow along on Twitter at #FNCM09.

[Michael J]

I hope you'll have some time after to share the vibe and what's interesting in the conversation. Of course, I am especially interested in print focused stuff. I've been floating the idea of "clickable print." The idea is connecting a story with a tinyurl and a dynamic QR code to a website or a video. The tinyurl now, the QR code as smart phones scale. The cool thing about a dynamic QR is that can carry embedded information on who is viewing when. That means the newspaper can get real time feedback from clicks on the mobile and they can get the metrics to compete/complement the web to give to advertisers.
If this sounds interesting, you can see how I think this can play out for newspapers at http://tinyurl.com/lml8vr