I found this article by Patrick Boehler and Madison Karas of Source to resonate with my own experience so far of journalism conferences:
We asked where journalism gatherings go wrong: Here’s what we heard
https://source.opennews.org/articles/we-asked-where-journalism-gatherings-go-wrong
From the article:
One participant described a community creator who attended a local journalism summit hoping to connect and learn, only to find the entire day was panels with no entry point for participation. We heard something similar at the civic journalism conference we wrote about last month: people arrive wanting to contribute and leave feeling shut out.
We know how to do this. We just don’t do it for ourselves.
This was maybe one of the most useful observations from the call: Journalism has developed methods for gathering input from audiences, understanding community needs, and building feedback loops. Audience research, user testing, community listening sessions. These are standard practices now.
We don’t see these or similar methods widely applied to how journalism organizes its own professional gatherings.
The profession that teaches others how to listen to their communities does not listen to its own. Several people raised this independently, which suggests it’s not a few people’s blind spot but a structural one.
Since 2022 I have been able to attend around five events presented as workshops or conferences for people in the world of journalism and publishing. This isn’t a huge sample size, so it’s not fair to draw sweeping conclusions from those experiences.
But it’s been a concern for me at some of these events that if you aren’t already a speaker or recognized industry leader, it can feel hard to figure out how to contribute as a “mere attendee,” or to get connected to the existing social structures and develop new relationships and share knowledge.
(A clear exception to this was SRCCON, which was radically participatory and encouraged contributions at every turn. Ironically, I attended that conference at a professional moment where I probably had the least to contribute and really needed to absorb expertise shared by others.)
It’s also the case that attending conferences is just hard for me to do right now; taking a day away from my ongoing responsibilities means extra scrambling on evenings or weekends to make up for it, missing already limited time with family, etc. I realize that’s a scramble many in the publishing world do anyway, and sometimes I can make it work, but not most of the time.
These conference dynamics struck me again as I read through this Neiman Lab piece by Laura Hazard Owen:
A new report looks at 559 funding proposals to determine local journalism’s biggest problems
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/a-new-report-looks-at-559-funding-proposals-to-determine-local-journalisms-biggest-problems
People working on problem-solving and sustainable solutions in the world of journalism and publishing need each other more than ever. Conferences and events seem like one of the main places that is expected to happen, so what does it mean if those venues turn out not to be as accessible and welcoming as they could be?
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