Media workshop at Kent State will address innovation, ethics

By Denise Dick

Staff report

kent

“Digital Doers” from legacy media, new media and news-gathering organizations in between will dig deep into ethics issues relating to innovation at the annual Poynter Kent State Media Ethics Workshop titled “Next Ethics?”

The sixth annual conference will feature speakers Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor of the Huffington Post; Adrian Holovaty, founder and editor of Everyblock.com; Paul Steiger, editor of ProPublica; and Michael Cherenson, immediate past president and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

The workshop takes place Thursday at Kent State University in Franklin Hall, home of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The event will be available to viewers via live stream on the Web and on mobile devices. All participants can contribute to the workshop discussions and ask questions of speakers via Twitter.

Huffington, author, editor and columnist for a popular news website bearing her name, will appear at the workshop via cyber-connection to talk about “What’s Next for Citizen Journalism?”

Holovaty, developer of EveryBlock, will be live at the event discussing data- mining and access to government information. EveryBlock.com is the hyperlocal online site that collects, aggregates and publishes data for ZIP codes and neighborhood blocks. EveryBlock now produces searchable news for 16 U.S. cities.

Steiger, also in person, will deliver the lunch keynote address. Steiger, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, is editor-in-chief of ProPublica, the independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism. ProPublica received the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting this year for a story about what happened at a New Orleans hospital cut off by floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina.

Michael Cherenson will lead a discussion tackling the growing debate about the influence public-relations people can have on virtually any opinion or topic by reaching out to bloggers.

Cherenson is a 20-year public relations veteran whose expertise extends to all disciplines of public relations, including corporate, marketing, internal and crisis communication, government relations, event management and interactive public relations. Local media practitioners also will participate.

The cost of the workshop is $25 for media and public-relations professionals, $15 for educators and free for students.

To register, visit the event website at: http://jmc.kent.edu/ethicsworkshop/2010.

The Poynter Kent State Media Ethics Workshop is sponsored by the Poynter Institute, Kent State’s Media Law Center for Ethics and Access, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State, Akron Area PRSA, Akron Beacon Journal and the Online News Association.