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Journalism's Ideals Meet Silicon Valley's Tools

NewsTools2008 takes place April 30-May 3 at the yahoo! Conference Center in Sunnyvale, California If you’re a Drupal programmer, user-experience expert, social-network innovator, or web 2.0 entrepreneur, you’re invited! The topic of the event is “Technology and the New Ecology of News: How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?” It’s billed as an event in which journalism’s ideals will meet Silicon Valley’s tools in a three-day, conceptual mashup. Groovy.

Hosted by the Journalism That Matters Collaborative, the Media Giraffe Project, the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Yahoo! Inc., this three day event aims to describe and invent tools for sustaining “journalism that matters.”

What exactly is “journalism that matters”? According to their website: “The point is to recommit journalism to what is fundamental for connecting news with its audience so that it serves and sustains us.”

With that in mind, key technologies to be covered at the conference include:

• Aggregation (which is killing web journalism, by the way!)
• Customization and personalization
• Geotagging
• Google
• XML

Participants will spend an afternoon and evening on April 30 describing the core values and elements of “journalism that matters”. They will then join two more days of discussion and design/build workshops with technologists.

If all goes as planned, journalists and technologists will work together to try and launch projects, form design circles and breakouts to conceive or deploy the best tools — off the shelf and invented on-the-fly — to put those values and elements into practice.

Sign up here, or check out the Ning group for more information.