The Online News Association’s 2012 Conference & Awards Banquet, Sept. 20-22, at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, is the premier gathering of highly engaged digital journalists who are shaping the future of journalism and technology — the perfect venue for your product, services or company.

Record-breaking numbers of journalists travel to ONA’s conference each year to learn about new tools, techniques and technologies, to discuss advancements and challenges in the industry, take advantage of the rare opportunity to network face-to-face, and share best practices with peers from all over the map. They also come to soak up the vibrant entrepreneurial spirit that distinguishes ONA conferences.

Attendee Profile

In 2011, for the fifth year in a row, our conference sold out, with an all-time high of more than 1,200 attendees from around the world at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. ONA conference attendees are a tech-savvy bunch. They include newsroom decision-makers, producers, content editors, technologists, programmers and designers from major media markets, independent and nonprofit websites and leading academic institutions. They are interested in the latest in software, hardware, content and distribution platforms.

Your Exposure

We don’t have a media list for our conference, and there’s a reason. Everyone you will meet is a member of the media, either hailing from a media technology website or thought leaders in their field with robust social networks. Make an impression on an ONA12 attendee and they’ll blog or tweet about it. ONA11 attendees included representatives of major corporate, independent and nonprofit media companies, including Mashable, Nieman Journalism Lab, CNN, ESPN, MSN International, Knight Digital Media Centers at Berkeley and USC Annenberg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Disney, to name a few.

And your chance for exposure doesn’t stop when the last attendee leaves. Talk about the 2011 conference has continued well beyond the event, with the #ONA11 hashtag on Twitter active for months after the conference.

Testimonials

There were 23,647 tweets on the #ONA11 hashtag last year, archived here. A total of 4,031 people tweeted about #ONA11.

There were also more than 20,000 impressions on individual Facebook walls, and more than 188 news results and 275 blog posts mentioning ONA11.

Here is a sample of what some attendees said about ONA11:

@moniguzman: 1,200 attendees, 130 speakers. Let the fun begin 🙂 #ona11

@KelseyProud: #ONA11 – the best family reunion ever. Have loved seeing all of you!

@NYT_JenPreston: Wow. 21,000 tweets with the #ONA11 tag archived here: twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/ona11 via @ONA

@lheron: A Twitter list of #ONA11 presenters: http://bit.ly/qe1GZv And all of the attendees: https://twitter.com/#!/ONAConf/attendees-at-ona-2011

@erikrolfsen: Great job by everyone at #ONA11. Best of the three I’ve attended. People have really found their feet in this space now. Thanks.

@weddady: My take away from the #ona11 conference is that journalism isn’t dying, it’s been redefined online.

@nytjim: Great to see hundreds of smart, energetic & creative digital journalists at #ONA11. Eager to renew acquaintances & make new ones.

ONA11 Recap

Some highlights from the 2011 Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet, held Sept. 22-24 at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston:

• In an interview with WBUR “On Point’s” Tom Ashbrook, Vivek Kundra, former CIO for the Obama Administration, opened the conference urging journalists to access and examine the wealth of government data available.
• Andy Carvin of NPR joined Mideast journalists to dig into the groundbreaking events and the communications revolution behind the Arab Spring protests.
• I Can Haz Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked humor, journalism and profits at the Friday Night Networking event.
• More than 100 people attended the Law School for Digital Journalists at Harvard, a full day of legal advice from top minds in the field.
• Field Trips to innovative media and technology sites, including Boston.com’s Incubeta Lab, the Cambridge Innovation Center and Google.
• Google, Twitter and Facebook hosted a full day of overflow sessions showing journalists how to better use their tools to gather news and create community.
• Our day-long Career Summit featured industry-leading recruiters and career counselors, followed by a Job Fair with recruiters from AOL, Yahoo!, USA TODAY, Frontline, Patch, the Washington Post, Mashable, NPR and the Associated Press, among others.
• The Online Journalism Awards, the only annual awards competition recognizing the best and the brightest work in digital news, closed the conference with a banquet hosted by Hari Sreenivasan of “PBS NewsHour.”