At first glance, the Online News Association’s annual con­fer­ence this past week­end looked like a throw­back to the early days of Web jour­nal­ism, with lots of famil­iar faces from the early days of the esteemed new media group. Jai Singh (now man­ag­ing edi­tor of the Huff­in­g­ton Post), Staci D. Kramer of paid­Con­tent, Joan Walsh of Salon, author Scott Rosen­berg, con­sul­tant Eliz­a­beth Osder, Jonathan Dube, Tom Regan, aca­d­e­mics like Paul Grabow­icz and Rosen­tal Alves — one might think the San Fran­cisco Hilton had added a Way­back Machine room.

But the ses­sions, orga­nized by Josh Hatch of USA Today and his team, were gen­er­ally engag­ing and forward-looking, a refresh­ing con­trast to the doom and gloom that afflicts most news indus­try gath­er­ings. The rea­son? These are the hands-on new media staffers, not the pub­lish­ers or top-echelon exec­u­tives who would clearly pre­fer if this whole Inter­net thing went away.

If this con­fer­ence had a theme, it was: Jour­nal­ism in the Age of Twitter.

I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion (online at Slideshare.net) on how jour­nal­ists can use social media tools to build com­mu­nity, and it found a recep­tive audi­ence. (See our sis­ter site, Socialbrite.org, for 6 Twit­ter tips for jour­nal­ists and 8 ways to use social media in the news­room. Both include free print­able hand­outs.) By and large, new media teams in online news­rooms are inter­ested in see­ing how the new gen­er­a­tion of social tools can help advance jour­nal­ism, which is why I like ONA best of all the media conferences.

Rolling out a few new tools, how­ever, won’t lead to the promised land of stay­ing in busi­ness. Tools are not a strat­egy. For that, news orga­ni­za­tions need to take a hard look at what’s work­ing in the online mar­ket­place, devise a strat­egy (of, say, two to four years’ dura­tion), bring in out­side experts (the team here at Socialmedia.biz would be a good start), and then begin inno­vat­ing with short-term projects. Set up goals and then mea­sure results with con­crete metrics.

Ran­dom bits from the conference

I didn’t attend the full con­fer­ence — sorry, ONA, but charg­ing speak­ers to attend on days they’re not speak­ing is aston­ish­ingly poor judg­ment — but here are a few nuggets I gleaned:

• Leo Laporte’s lunchtime talk Fri­day was a high­light of the show (when the Livestream video was work­ing). You can see it at BuzzMa­chine, and it’s worth a watch.

• In addi­tion, Suzanne Yada has a behind-the-scenes inter­view with Leo Laporte.

• You can find 98 links to web­sites and arti­cles (every­thing I ref­er­enced in my talk, and more) at http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/ona09.

• The AP’s Kevin Roach held up the Canon EOS 5D Mark II Dig­i­tal SLR Cam­era as almost the per­fect news gath­er­ing tool, for pho­tos and even for shoot­ing hi-def video (it costs $4,000). “This thing is amaz­ing,” he said. He also said AP trains its reporters to use the Canon HV30 cam­corder but they’re look­ing to move up to a more robust device.

• I didn’t know much about the AP Online Video Net­work. I think Roach said it costs $25 for stream­ing 100 hours of video for your audi­ence; see the spe­cific pack­ages.

• Andrew Fitzger­ald, Cur­rent TV: “Cit­i­zens and peo­ple with cam­eras are not a replace­ment for reporters and photographers.”

• While the uni­ver­sity stu­dents in the Stu­dent News­room did a bang-up job cov­er­ing the con­fer­ence, I spot­ted only one jour­nal­ist (from BayNewser) inter­view­ing atten­dees in the hall­way — and only 13 pho­tos on flickr tagged with ona09 (other than the 12 I uploaded). Com­pare that with the thou­sands of pho­tos at a tech event like TechCrunch 50 or Web 2.0 Summit.

• Thanks to ONA’s Liz Lufkin of Yahoo! for your gen­er­ous com­ments about my con­tri­bu­tions to the con­fer­ence, and to the atten­dees who wished we had more time for a deeper dive into social media. We do offer train­ing work­shops for your team, by the way.

• Amy Webb offers a resource list of 10 Tech Trends worth a look.

• Smartly, ONA has added links to pre­sen­ta­tions given by speak­ers on the sched­ule page.

• See RTNDA.org (the Asso­ci­a­tion of Elec­tronic Jour­nal­ists) and NPPA.org (National Press Pho­tog­ra­phers Asso­ci­a­tion) for codes of ethics for jour­nal­ism and photography.

• Some of the best cov­er­age of ONA comes from Reportr.net.

• I did a video inter­view with YouTube’s Olivia Ma, and have more to say about the keynote by Lisa Stone of BlogHer, but will save those for future posts.

• The Next News­room Project is list­ing take­aways from ONA 2009. Among them is the fol­low­ing from Jesse James Gar­rett (cour­tesy of Yuri):

12 things every news site should know

12 things every news site should know, by Jesse James Gar­rett, pres­i­dent of Adap­tive Path:

1) Know who you are. Define what you’re best at.
2) Be in the Web, not on the Web. See your prod­uct as part of the Web, not a deliv­ery chan­nel.
3) The Web is not the world. Deliver well what users come to your site for.
4) Know what peo­ple do with news. Peo­ple absorb news. Peo­ple want to apply news. Peo­ple want to share news. News pro­vides plea­sure.
5) Sup­port dif­fer­ent modes of engage­ment. Design solu­tions that sup­port scan­ning needs and deep dive needs.
6) Every page is the home page.
7) Nav­i­ga­tion is dead. Long-live nav­i­ga­tion. Peo­ple don’t use global nav­i­ga­tion, they use con­tex­tual nav­i­ga­tion.
8) Put the multi in mul­ti­me­dia — Use a vari­ety of means to tell sto­ries
9) Head­lines should tempt, not tease. Head­lines should make peo­ple want to know what is on the other side of the link, not just won­der what the story is about.
10) Think out­side the blob. Struc­ture your data.
11) It’s an appli­ca­tion, not a pub­li­ca­tion. Cre­ate a tool that let’s peo­ple work with the news, not just read the news.
12) Try things out, throw things out.

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JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.