ONA 12: A brief recap of the largest conference on online journalism

We had a great time last week at the Online News Association (ONA) annual conference, held in San Francisco. The world’s largest and most important conference on online journalism was an opportunity to hear about “what’s happening now and what will be happening in the future” in online media, as Stanford’s Jim Bettinger says. There were more than 1,400 people in attendance and 34,505 tweets labelled with the hashtag #ona12.

We participated in The Midway, an exposition of innovation. We presented and demoed CartoDB to all journalists, organizations and media companies interested in learning more about it as a tool for data journalism. We want to thank all of them for their interest. We are really thrilled about the great responses and feedback we received.

On the closing day, hundreds of online media practitioners gathered in the Online Journalism Awards banquet, the only such awards in the country. CartoDB was a finalist in the technology innovation in the service of journalism award. Here there is the full list of winners and a recap of the night.

The ONA meeting in SF started with a moving keynote by José Antonio Vargas and end up with a celebration of innovation and storytelling in today’s journalism —including a standing ovation for Homicide Watch, awarded with the Knight Award for Public Service. It was a inspiring event. See you next year in Atlanta!

(Photo: Heikki Polonen)