Another year, another Chicago new-media conference. On September 23-24, Chicago hosted the multiply sponsored, two-day Block By Block: Community News Summit 2010. Or was it two conferences? The first day, monickered Advancing Chicago’s News Ecosystem (yet also referred to as Community News Matters 2010) was also promoted as a stand-alone event. Actual good came out of the conference(s) and I want to talk about that, so let me get some constructive criticism out of the way first.
If you find the above conference branding/naming confusing, so do I. This was, in fact (according to sponsor Reynolds Journalism Institute, anyway), one conference, dealing with issues of import to the same media community. However, lack of clarity about the conference’s two-day nature in marketing materials promulgated by some of the conferences six sponsors and the fact that not all invitees were invited to both days of the conference had an unfortunate balkanizing effect both on discussion and on the dissemination of information relevant to Chicago’s online news community as a whole.
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