ONA members aren’t immune to the volatility in the media landscape — these are uncertain times for far too many of our friends and colleagues.

ONA wants to help. For every $75 donated through the Support a Journalist Campaign, ONA will award a free membership to a colleague whose job has been claimed by the economic downturn.

Even better, your gift will be matched, thanks to a grant from the Challenge Fund for Journalism, which has committed to matching new donations to ONA if we can raise $90,000 by August 2009.

From now until May 31, every $75 you donate will go toward our goal of raising $10,000 -- that's 133 free memberships.

Donate now to help our colleagues and our industry. A gift of just $75 provides:

• Access to free or heavily discounted multimedia training, job listings, conferences and other professional development opportunities for journalists in transition
• An opportunity to grow and diversify the ONA community, expanding knowledge, networking and the pool of innovative ideas — more members mean more chances to learn
• More resources for ONA to continue to develop member benefits and be a leader in the digital journalism community

Don’t miss this opportunity to keep quality journalists in the field, and keep ONA a vibrant, dynamic community, with a gift of $75 today.

Many thanks,

Jonathan Dube
President

Dear ONA member:

I’m delighted to announce that the Online News Association has launched a new, improved Web site at Journalists.org, designed to better serve and connect our nearly 1,800 members across the globe.

The site is the first step to giving our members -- leading-edge journalists from around the world -- new ways to share ideas, content, technology and news.
 
Here’s what you’ll find when you log in:

• Networking features, including discussion groups that connect members by region and area of interest, giving you the ability to have one-on-one conversations and to chat in real time.
• An easy-to-navigate membership directory – searchable by name, type of organization, areas of expertise, and more – enabling you to more easily network with people with common interests.
• A Career Center that allows members to post and search job openings.
• A new training section with innovative digital presentations tagged by topic, source and medium. This section features videotaped sessions from ONA’s sold-out 2008 annual conference, with tips on the latest techniques in multimedia storytelling from the New York Times, Washington Post, USA TODAY and the BBC, among others.

And here’s how to log in:

• Your username and password haven’t changed. Use the same e-mail address and password that gave you access to the previous site.
• If you joined ONA between Nov. 13 and today, your username is your email address and your password is "ONA" followed by the last four digits of your primary phone number.
• If you've altered any of your login information since Nov. 13 or have any other problems logging onto the site, please e-mail Sherry Skalko at website@journalists.org.

We recommend that you check your membership expiration date. We have moved from a database that provides a 90-day grace period for payment of dues to a 30-day notification system. To help ease this transition, as a bonus, memberships that would have expired between Aug. 15 and Dec. 31, 2008, have been extended to expire on Jan. 1, 2009.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll notice you’ve been placed in a primary group by region. This allows you to immediately connect with other members in your area and enables us to better communicate with you about events in your area. This does not segregate you, however. You may join any regional group or topic discussion group you’d like. And if you’d like to start a new discussion group, please let us know.

After you’ve logged in, please take a few minutes to fill out your new personal profile. You’ll find the more complete it is, the better your networking experience will be on the site.

For more details on how to use the new features on the site, read the Journalists.org User’s Guide.

As I mentioned, this is a first step. During 2009, we’ll continually build out the site with more resources to help you learn how to find and use the latest industry tools available.

This is your site, and we always want to hear your ideas on how to make it better. Please send them to website@journalists.org.

Enjoy.

Cheers,
Jonathan Dube
President, Online News Association
jdube@journalists.org

I am delighted to announce that the Online News Association has hired a wonderful new Executive Director, Jane McDonnell.

Jane comes with the perfect skill set for ONA, as it gets set to mark its 10-year anniversary next year and moves into the next phase of its mission to connect and guide digital journalists.

Jane starts her new role today and will be joining us at the conference later this week. There will be ample opportunities to meet her at the conference.

She is a veteran communicator with a strong history of creating and promoting online journalism in the commercial, independent and nonprofit worlds. Her wide-ranging experience covers strategic multimedia planning, reporting, editing, web development, community outreach and fundraising.

Jane was an early adapter of online news. As a managing editor at Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services (KRT), she created the Special Sections department, the first to post ready-to-publish newspaper pages online to domestic and overseas subscribers, and worked on Knight Ridder's early corporate-wide digital efforts. An advocate of community involvement, she received the company's Excellence Award for her work as president of Partners in Journalism, a volunteer group that helped Washington D.C. public high schools produce newspapers.

In 2001, seeing the potential for online news independently produced and funded, Jane started up Public Access Journalism (PAJ), a multimedia company that examined social issues in print, broadcast and on the web. She directed the editorial, communications and website team for PAJ's nationally syndicated online and print projects, including "Silent Treatment: Addiction in America"; "The Shape We're In" and "Finding Our Way: Living with Dying in America." These citizen-centric initiatives appeared in more than 300 newspapers and their websites through a distribution partnership with McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Themed public websites featured web chats, blogs, videos, podcasts and interactive resources, all linked to and promoted on print sites.

In 2006, Jane oversaw the communications, marketing and digital efforts at the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a nonprofit in the vanguard of producing investigative journalism online. In redesigning the website, she introduced multimedia features to increase donor membership and reached out to the blogosphere and online and broadcast media. During her tenure, CPI won awards for online projects from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reports & Editors, the National Press Foundation, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Association of Healthcare Journalists, and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

In 2008, she served as consulting senior editor for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, editing the chapters of the 2008 State of the News Media Report, the nonprofit group's signature, online-only annual project offering original analysis of each of the major media platforms.

She and her husband, Larry, live in Maryland, and have a son, Max, and a daughter, Rachael.

If you will be at the conference this week, please be sure to introduce yourself to Jane.

We're very excited about working with her and our new Web editor, Sherry Skalko, to lead the online news community through these challenging and interesting times.

I'd also like to thank Interim Executive Director Tom Regan for doing an amazing job over the past few months and for helping to put together a very impressive conference that we are all looking forward to this week. Tom has generously agreed to continue working with ONA for a few months during the transition period after the conference. If you see Tom at the conference, please be sure to thank him as well.

I hope to see you in D.C. It's going to be a great conference.

Jonathan Dube
President
Online News Association
jdube@journalists.org

We've got some exciting news to share: Interactive Narratives, a multimedia storytelling showcase founded by Andrew DeVigal five years ago, has re-launched under the sponsorship of the Online News Association -- better than ever.

The new Interactive Narratives is designed to capture the best of online visual storytelling around the country and the world. The goal is to highlight rich-media content, engaging storytelling and eye-popping design in an environment that fosters interaction, discussion and learning.

Unlike the original Interactive Narratives, submission to the database is open to anyone. If you're an ONA member, you don't have to register for IN -- just use your ONA login and password. Others can register on the site directly (or, we hope, join ONA).

ONA members and registered users can rate and make comments on individual entries. A sort functionality allows users to list those interactives focused on their preference or craft.

Some other features worth noting:

• Expectations: To continue the high-quality of entries and engagement on this site, Andrew has outlined a few rules and regulations on our terms of use page.
• Bugs: If you discover (or uncover) any strange or unexpected functionality to the site, please drop us a note.
• Wishlist: Got ideas? So did we. Share yours with us.
• Beyond the network: There's more to keep you inspired and connected -- NetVibes Universe, Facebook Fan Page and more to come...

For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Interactive Narratives, Andrew launched the site as a personal bookmarking system to track multimedia packages as he lectured and conducted workshops at The Poynter Institute and other venues around the country. Once Andrew joined The New York Times to be its Multimedia Editor, he had less time to devote to Interactives Narratives and put it on hiatus. The ONA Board, recognizing the value of the site, asked Andrew what we could do to help him revive it.

After several months of redesign and development work by Andrew and a team of really smart people, we are thrilled that Interactive Narratives 2.0 is live and ready for your participation.

I'd like to especially thank Andrew for all of his hard work on the site, as well as Teresa Hanafin, ONA board member and director of community publishing for Boston.com, for getting ONA involved and overseeing the relationship.

Other members of the team responsible for the relaunch include Ervic Aquino (Stormline Media), Angelo DeVigal (DeVigal Design), Jason Speck and Gabriel Dance. Active beta testers included: Regina McCombs (The Poynter Institute), Will Sullivan (Journerdism), Paige West (MSNBC.com), Seth Gitner (The Roanoke Times), William Couch (USAToday.com), Katy Newton (LATimes.com), Zach Wise (Las Vegas Sun), Jody Sugrue (Move30), Gabriel Dance and Amy O'Leary (NYTimes.com) and Ehrin Macksey.

This is the beginning of many exciting plans ONA has to improve its web offerings for our members and for the journalism community at large.

I hope you enjoy the new site -- both as a reader and as a participant.

Jonathan Dube
President
Online News Association
jdube@journalists.org