#3 – Pam Maples & Anthony Moor, ONA Conference co-chairs

The Online News Association’s annual conference has been a mirror to the shifts and tremors of the journalism industry meeting the Internet. In 2002, the few hundred people who attended the conference learned about transforming the newsroom with “really cool Flash applications,” said ONA 2012 co-chair Anthony Moor.

That interest in newsroom transformation is still a topic of discussion, but it’s become a subset of a much broader discussion about the journalism industry, Moor said.

This year’s conference in San Francisco (Sept. 20-22) will include product showcases, new technological tools, journalism start-ups and — the focus this year — storytelling.

It’s a return to the basics that Moor and cochair Pam Maples say show the desire among people to maintain the integrity of journalism, regardless of how that information is being shared.

“I actually think we’re just getting into the really exciting part of this disruption of our business,” Maples said. “It’s absolutely still scary for a lot of journalists and there’s a lot of legitimate concern about where we go and how we sustain it and the financial questions. But I think we’re deep enough in it where we’re starting to see stuff come out that’s really focused on preserving some of those core values but doing it for this modern age.”

About the guests:

(Photo courtesy of ONA)

Pam Maples is the innovation director at the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University.

Previously, she was managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she led the integration of print and digital. Under her leadership, the publication was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Maples was also assistant managing editor at the Dallas Morning News, where she had won a Pulitzer as team for international reporting.