2010 National Editorial Conference: Chicago

photo © City of Chicago

Digital skills, training, strategies, and ethics among July 21–23 meeting highlights

Digital skills and ethics will be among the hot topics for discussion at ASBPE’s National Editorial Conference this summer.

Slated for July 21–23 at Chicago’s Hotel Sax, the conference will include an examination of the society’s latest original research about the state of editorial digital skills, training, and strategies.

ASBPE teamed with the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University to develop what we think is B2B media’s most comprehensive research into this important area.

On the panel from Medill will be Abe Peck, director of business to business communication, and Bob LeBailly, market research faculty member for the Magazine Innovation Project. Representing ASBPE will be associate director Robin Sherman. The three worked closely to develop the survey and analyze the results.

The research also touches on the skills and strategies editors believe will be important in the next 12 months.

The results have a direct impact on job descriptions for staff editors as well as those who are on their own as entrepreneural journalists and freelancers.

Ethics session

Probably since B2B publications first came on the scene, relationships with advertisers, publicists, and sources presented ethics quandaries for editors. In this digital age, the relationships in many cases have become strained due to the various new technologies and platforms calling for different ways of thinking. And the strain is complicated by a poor economy.

To examine these trends and prsent some practical resolution to problematic issues, ASBPE is planning an interactive “town hall” session, a return to a much-acclaimed format we developed for the 2006 Chicago conference.

We’ll tackle several scenarios with ethical implications from both the print and digital side, and look for solutions with the help of ASBPE’s ethics committee members and fellow attendees. Our reference will be ASBPE’s Guide To Preferred Editorial Practices and the experience of attendees.

Attendee participation. To that end, we will ask attendees to supply their own scenarios for discussion.

The session will be moderatored by new ethics committee chair, editorial consultant Howard Rauch.

Magazines of the Year

As always, on the morning of day two of the conference we will feature case studies from our two Magazines of the Year, which will have been named the previous night at our Print Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet.

Watch for our Web site and email newsletter for registration information and session updates.

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