ONA26 Unconference - Session 3: Newsroom Gripes and How To Fix Them

Speakers: Jessie Wilms and Shelby Blackley, WTF is SEO

Newsroom complaints are nothing new. The issues — and solutions — to these problems are endless and cyclical. And we all love to gripe about them.

Designed to be a collaborative “gripefest” — but one with purpose! — this talk invites participants to share frustrations from their own personal experiences in newsrooms, along with solutions, through an anonymous suggestion-box-style format. We will tackle these questions in an intimate, comfortable space for honest feedback that is both cathartic and productive. Drawing on solutions that have worked in other newsrooms, we will take complaint and turn them into actionable takeaways.

From burnout to miscommunication to workflow breakdowns, the same gripes surface again and again across newsrooms of every size and niche. This interactive session tackles some of the most common newsroom pain points and, more importantly, explores practical, real-world ways to fix them.

Unconference sessions are attendee-generated and voted-upon programming that are less formal and require less planning than traditional conference offerings. Running in sequential hour blocks from 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM and 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM on Wednesday, April 1, these open-source concepts will close the ONA26 conference.