ISOJ Online will offer five workshops; check out the topics & register for free to attend the conference and workshops

The International Symposium on Online Journalism will hold a series of brunch workshops from July 20 – 24 to give journalists, media executives and scholars advice and practical skills that they can use to advance their digital news coverage. 

The workshops, which are part of ISOJ’s first-ever fully online conference, will be livestreamed on Zoom. In the past, the workshops have been held in person during ISOJ’s lunch break in Austin. This year the workshops will be “brunches” and there will be more available than ever before. During the five-day conference, we’ll have one workshop each day from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. U.S. Central Time (GMT/UTC -5). 

Registration for the free workshops is now open. When registering, just select the ticket(s) for the workshop(s) you want to attend. You’re welcome to register for as many as you’d like. 

“When we moved online we wanted to bring this feature of ISOJ, but instead of it being lunch time – because of us being in different time zones – we have named it ‘brunch.’ But these brunches will continue in the same spirit as those in previous years,” said professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center and ISOJ.

Microsoft experts will kick off the brunches on July 20 with a workshop on how to go beyond infographics to engage audiences. This workshop will allow journalists who may not have coding skills to find new ways to visually engage their readers. 

Cathleen Crowley, data journalist and web producer at the Albany Times Union; Verah Okeyo, health editor at the Daily Nation in Kenya; and Vera Chan, Microsoft News Labs’ senior manager for worldwide journalist relations, will teach attendees about Power BI. The no-code tool allows newsrooms to tell powerful stories of business relationships, election results, climate change and more. 

On Tuesday, July 21, Marco Túlio Pires and Juan Manuel Lucero, who work at Google News Lab, will highlight the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help newsrooms. 

The two experts will lead two separate workshops — one in English and one in Spanish — about how these technologies can help journalists make sense of large datasets, find patterns in pictures, audio and text, as well as enhance their workflow. 

The following day, on Wednesday, July 22, Laura Garcia, who heads training and education for First Draft, will teach journalists and editors how they can use TikTok to advance their reporting and combat disinformation. The social media app is now wildly popular with teens and millennials. It can not only be used as a reporting tool but also for monitoring disinformation that’s catching the attention of a younger audience. 

Garcia will hold an interactive session to show journalists how to use the app and give tips for what to keep in mind when newsrooms first start using TikTok. 

The workshop on Thursday, July 23 will, cover how newsrooms can improve audience engagement through transparency, inclusion and ethics. Trust Project CEO Sally Lehrman, who is an internationally recognized expert on how to build a more trustworthy press, will offer advice on what newsrooms worldwide can do to build trust with their audience. Specifically, she’ll explore how to tighten up your best practices in inclusion, ethics, and content labeling, and make these clear to the public. Participants will learn how these steps can build loyalty, and in turn, subscriptions and other types of participation.

On the final day of ISOJ, Friday, July 24, the brunch workshop will feature speakers from across the globe to brainstorm new ideas on how to fund public interest media worldwide. 

In April 2020, BBC Media Action and Luminate released in London a study that outlined the economic and political crisis facing media that is free and independent. On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Journalism Project was working on a $50 million initiative to help funding “civic news organizations” in the United States.

Both projects will be discussed during this workshop with AJP CEO Sarabeth Berman; Chalkbeat founder and CEO Elizabeth Green, who is also AJP co-founder and co-chair of the board;  Nishant Lalwani, managing director of Luminate; and Dele Olojede, founder of Africa In the World. Columbia University Senior Lecturer Anya Schiffrin, who has been studying this topic,  will lead the workshop. 

Check the ISOJ program and speaker lineup and sign up now for free! The workshops require a separate ticket, so if you registered before the workshops were posted, you need to go back to the registration page to sign up for them.

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