April 1, 2014 | International
15th ISOJ to be most international edition ever with online journalists from 40 countries
With participants from 40 countries, the 15th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) will be the most international edition of the conference since it started in 1999 at the University of Texas at Austin. Registration was suspended more than a week ago when the venue capacity was reached.This year’s ISOJ has broken participation records with almost 400 participants registered for the conference, which will include a delegation from South Korea, several international guests invited by the Open Society Foundation’s London-based Program on Independent Media and the Google-Knight Center Fellows awarded with an all-expenses-paid trip to Austin for their projects for the Knight Center’s Massive Open Online Course “Development of Journalistic Projects for the Web,” sponsored by Google.
“One of our guests told me last week that ISOJ is becoming the United Nations of Online Journalism. In fact, every year ISOJ becomes more global, with people flying for many hours from all continents just to come to Austin and attend our conference. We are very proud of having journalists, media executives and scholars from around the world participating in the event,” said Rosental Alves, founder of ISOJ and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. “Even if we are not the U.N. of online journalists, I believe that it is fair to say that during two days, ISOJ makes Austin become the Online Journalism Capital of the World.”
Since the ISOJ registration process does not ask for the country of origin of attendees, it is hard to pinpoint a precise number, but at least 40 countries were identified as the origin of most of the ISOJ attendees this year: Canada, Thailand, Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, South Korea, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Spain, El Salvador, Nepal, Argentina, Finland, Brazil, Georgia, Bahrain, Belarus, Guatemala, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Macedonia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Haiti, Dominican Republic, China, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Portugal, Switzerland, Ukraine, France, Cambodia and New Zealand.
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For the last 15 years, ISOJ has brought together the top journalists, media executives, researchers and academics in the field to discuss the latest trends, issues and innovations in online journalism. Last year, ISOJ attracted more than 350 participants from over 30 countries and focused on discussing the disruption of the news industry’s business models, multimedia storytelling, data visualization, and changes in web design architecture.
This year, ISOJ will take place on April 4 and 5 at the auditorium of the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art, located at 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., in Austin, Texas. In addition to the main auditorium, adjacent rooms with video feed will be used to accommodate more people. As in previous years, hundreds of people from all over the world are expected to follow the live video streaming offered through ISOJ’s website the days of the conference. There will be two video streams available, the original in English and a second one with simultaneous translation to Spanish.
Thanks to sponsor Univision Noticias, simultaneous translation of the event into Spanish will also be available for attendees through wireless equipment at the Blanton Museum auditorium.
The ISOJ website contains videos and transcripts of all sessions of ISOJ since 1999, besides research papers, PowerPoint presentations and other materials. The site is open to the public as a unique repository of testimonials about the evolution of digital journalism.
This year’s ISOJ is supported by the Knight Foundation, The Dallas Morning News, Omidyar Network, Google, the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and Univision Noticias.