As the Online News Association annual conference unfolded last weekend, my coworkers and I were eagerly watching and griping at the same time. It would have been awesome to be there.

As tightly scheduled, financially struggling journalists, these big industry conferences seem more and more out of reach to attend but they also offer the greatest payoff in an industry where networking and skill sharpening is nearly the only way to stay afloat.

Lori Todd and I coauthored a blog post about how the expensive cost associated with these beneficial industry events ends up hurting several areas of our business in the long run, in ways that industry leaders may or may not realize. A tidbit:

Expensive conferences put out-of-work journalists at an even greater disadvantage. Attending industry events and keeping skill sets up-to-date are all we can rely on to market ourselves in a suddenly flooded field of applicants. Attending a conference is resume material. Following a conference online is not.

The rest of the post is over at Lori Todd’s blog. We’d love to hear feedback on other ways or ideas to establish more affordable training and networking opportunities that don’t necessarily involve staying connected through social media. Another 10,000 Words post from Mark Luckie stresses the importance of real-life relationships. I couldn’t agree more, I just wish they were more affordable.

Find us on Twitter: @malcolli, @loritodd. Let’s strike up a conversation.

You already know me. Lori Todd graduated in 2006 from the University of Miami and has worked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Austin American-Statesman before returning to the Miami Herald as a news page designer in September 2008.

We know it’s been about two months since our first #HeraldTweetup (which totally rocked because of all of you lovely people) and South Florida is getting antsy. In case you haven’t heard, we’ve set a date, so you should save it! Set a reminder alert on your cell phone and RSVP on our twtvite for Thursday, Sept. 10 at 6 p.m. at Crazy Pianos (@CrazyPianosMIA) in Coconut Grove. The Miami Herald staff of reporters, bloggers, designers, editors, producers and tweeters are looking forward to happy hour with our followers on Twitter.

We ask that you RSVP so we can get an estimate of how many people to expect. We will be announcing some very exciting events that the Herald is planning and there will be plenty of people on hand to demo our new Dolphins ‘09 iPhone app if you want to check it out (come find me or @loritodd and we’ll show it off).  Hope to see you there!

Just a quick note to share this article from New Times Broward-Palm Beach about my stomach-testing experience on a pizza crawl with one of my favorite buddies, who also happens to be THE pizza celebrity of South Florida.

I took a mini pizza tour with John Linn, who wrote the article, and Craig Lapp (his alias) of WorstPizza.com.

I’d go into more detail but Linn summed it up better than I ever could:

Mallory’s Hawaiian was completely off-base, with huge chunks of pineapple and undercooked, cheap-tasting ham. (The later surprised me because I had previously enjoyed La Fontana’s salumi, including speck, a smoked, cured Italian ham.)  …read the rest

Had a blast, stuffed myself silly, got to eat a pizza that isn’t on the restaurant’s menu and only made for Lapp and got a mention in the article. What can I say. It’s pays to be pizza expert!

Although I didn’t have the chance (or the $$) to go to FOWA (Future of Web Apps), I had a great time last Sunday at BarCampMiami. For those unfamiliar with the concept of BarCamp (and no, it doesn’t involve mixing cocktails for tips), check out the wiki here. They sum it up like this:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Greg Linch (@greglinch), student at the UM School of Communications, worked with BarCampMiami coordinator Alex de Carvalho (@alexdc) to bring specific sessions focused on news innovation tailored for us journos who were in the house. There were quite a few of us. I got to meet Twitter friends Danny Sanchez (@dannysanchez) of the Orlando Sentinel and Journalistopia and Mathilde Piard (@mathildepiard), Columbia J-School grad and web editor at the Palm Beach Post as well as a slew of other tech-minded smart people.

One of my favorite presentations came from Rick Martinez (@digx) of FIU about evolving news. “There is not a newspaper industry. There is a news industry” rang very true. Not sure why we cling to the print product with our cold, dead hands. That’s a different post.

Rick Martinez of FIU and Greg Linch of the University of Miami

I spent yesterday and today (Wednesday and Thursday) as a fellow at the WeMedia Conference at the University of Miami. My job as a volunteer was to twitter the breakout sessions with the #wemedia hashtag as a way for people who couldn’t make it to track all the good ideas being tossed about. If you follow me on Twitter (@malcolli), you can see a rundown of a few of the breakout sessions.

It’s amazing to see people from so many different types of organizations (Journalism, non-profits, startups) collaborating on how to use media to innovate and better their futures. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

Brian Storm of MediaStorm

David Liu, CEO of TheKnot.com

The #WeMedia buzz began almost instantly around the Twitterverse in the morning intro session as awards were given to Game Changers in the realm of advancing media. As a political nerd, I was a tad (ok, maybe more than a tad) devastated that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe wasn’t in physical attendance to accept his award. Twitter, ZeFrank and others were honored. Go to the web site for a better rundown.  The twitterers in the room started to slowly emerge and the convo took off.

Because I was there as a volunteer twitterer who was encouraged not just to tweet a play-by-play but to add my voice to the mix, I made a point not to hold back. Granted, the caliber of participants was very high and I wasn’t sure how much value they would see in tweets from a 22-year-old recent college grad 3 months into her first newspaper gig, but I found that the presenters appreciated the instant feedback and honesty.

During a social media session with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit), formerly of AOL and Yahoo Personals and fellow Twitter-holic, she was using her BlackBerry to scan our tweets since she knew that some of us were actively tweeting the session. Hats off to her. Perfect example of a how Twitter is a tool and not just a silly site for sharing what you had for lunch. I sent out a tweet saying I thought the session was a little too basic and she jumped right in and got the ball rolling to get to the higher-level stuff (like Facebook Connect, which I’m trying to get really familiar with).

Susan Mernit (left) and Rebecca Watson of Real Girls Media (right)

On the downside, I had over 200 tweets over the two-day event, which wouldn’t normally be on the downside except that I do have some followers who I bet were completely overwhelmed and annoyed by a long stream of #wemedia, #wemedia, #wemedia.

This makes me rethink an issue that came up a few months ago about whether or not to split up my tweets into two accounts; one for Mallory Colliflower, the conference-attending working professional and one for Mallory Colliflower, the chick who checks icanhazcheezburger multiple times a day, swears from time to time, likes to share music and stay in touch with friends.

More importantly, because of the buzz and conversation about the WeMedia conference we were able to generate on Twitter, #WeMedia trended in the #2 spot twice during the conference. Quite a feat if you want people to be talking about what you are doing and saying.  I managed to be the top trendsetter for the #WeMedia hashtag and had the second-highest number of retweeted posts, behind Tom Kennedy (@tomkennedy), multimedia editor and consultant from Arlington, Virginia.  More stats here.

Was my mission accomplished?  I give a confident ‘yes.’ Between Greg, Mathilde and another Columbia graduate Veronica Zaragovia (@verozaragovia), we managed to provide a service to the media-minded who couldn’t make it to the conference as well as meet and connect with people who had similar and differing thoughts on what was going on in front of all of us. In regards to that, the bloggers over at the WeMedia page have done an excellent job summarizing and analyzing all of the discussion that took place. I won’t try to duplicate what they’ve already done so well, so head there for more.

Big ‘thank you’ to the organizers of the event, particularly Chad Capellman (@chadrem), WeMedia’s web producer and to Greg Linch for inviting me to join the team. I was thrilled to meet all of the people that I did and hope to hear more from and about them in the future.

One of the biggest issues plaguing print journalism with the rise of the internet is the inability for a newspaper to encourage interactive reader discussion. This usually takes place online in story comment sections or community forums. In print, this kind of audience sound-off can only take place among the few letters that are selected to print in “letters to the Editor” section.

These days, readers are talking and discussing and ranting more than ever. Even according to the 10,000 Words blog (one of my favorites), the only section that appeared twice in their post about the six Newspaper sections rendered obsolete by the web, was the Opinions section, which they say both isn’t going anywhere (“Even at their most basic form, newspapers will always contain someone’s opinion, albeit with a lot more fact-checking.”), but also serves less purpose because of comment sections.

Digging to the Opinion section means flipping through chunks of other sections to find a jumble of editorials from columnists and cartoonists and selected letters to the editor, all on different topics thrown together for the sake of keeping bias separate from fact. The story on 1A, for example, about South Florida housing becoming more affordable may or may not have a letter or opinion piece to accompany it over in the Op/Ed section, but readers are forced to go and scope it out, with or without a teaser from the story.

What if the Op/Ed section was dispersed throughout the entire paper? Each section — Nation, World, Local, Living, etc. — could have three or four pages in the back dedicated to letters and columns about the current events and issues in that section. I know some papers already do this in some form. The Miami Herald has certain columnists that are published on 1A and 1B on a weekly basis. These are usually the pieces that get readers stirring online the most as well. Comment sections for online versions of columns usually fill up pretty quickly. Some examples: Myriam Marquez, 33 comments and Linda Robertson, 148 comments .

In certain scenarios (like yesterday’s news of A-Rod’s positive steroid test), we had our column up online before it ran in print the next day. If we scooped some of the better-quality comments that were posted online and ran them beneath the story as “What others are saying,” print readers would get a taste of the buzz happening on our site. Online readers would also be compelled to write more thoughtful comments on the Web with the opportunity to get some play in print. This isn’t something that hasn’t been said before, but a stronger effort should be made to link print and the Web. Promos on the bottom of stories to “go online for a photo gallery” don’t paint a good picture of the conversation taking place about that story.

If we encourage more reader contribution to the print product, “citizen journalism” to use a cliche, it would allow more readers to talk to each other in addition to reading the static opinions of a few returning columnists.

As a more online-centric person when it comes to news, I know the argument could be made that this already occurs online in the ways that I’ve stated, so why duplicate it in print? But I think that goes against the nature of starting a conversation.

We have painted this picture of the prestige of becoming a journalist. That somehow after a few years of J-school we are granted the exclusive ability to feed information to people. In the online world, information is shared. You are not being talked AT, but rather talked to, listened to and open to a world of infinite conversation. Print newspapers should do a better job of emulating that.

I don’t want to sound naive. I fully understand the dire state of newspapers and as an online producer it is easier for me to envision a future of paperless news. But before we hammer the last nail into the coffin, what do newspapers have to lose when trying new things? It’s now or never to take some risks with the print product. I’d love any links to examples/blogs of papers who are doing this already (I doubt this is a novel idea).