NABJ Convention 2012: NOLA Style!

I can’t believe I’ll be leaving for NABJ Convention in just about 6 days!

I’m takin’ the good ole MegaBus over to Nawlins. Pray for me y’all.

As always, I will be blogging from Convention and providing you all with my photos and other insights and crazy stories…remember last year? I’m sure there will be plenty to talk about.

I can’t wait to start posting, and I can’t wait for my first trip to NOLA!

Newsroom Drama but Not With the Students…

August 5, 2011

In my last post about convention I started to mention how Thursday was going. I went to the opening plenary (underwhelming but not bad), and then headed over to the career fair for a little socializing with some friends and then back to the NABJ Student Project newsroom.

Now, shortly after I got back to my computer, I heard a little commotion. I looked up to see and hear one of the NABJ presidential candidates huffing and puffing through the newsroom because she was angry that we printed a story about her recent campaign violation.

….

So, we print something true but slightly unfavorable to you, and now we don’t have journalistic ethics, which is what she burst in alleging? Let me add that we also included the violations of 2 other candidates, both of whom won.

But anyway.

That provided a quite a start to the day.

So the day goes on and everything was cool. Don’t forget about our little presidential candidate though. She’ll come up again.

At 6pm I headed over the CNN reception at the Marriott hotel and it was fun, great food, and I saw my man Don Lemon, something that always fills me with joy :-) Also ran into some other CNN talent you may know: Soledad O’Brien, TJ Holmes, and InSession/HLN’s Ryan Smith. Very nice! *Borat voice*

I went back to the newsroom to check in and then headed to the Target reception, which was also fabulous. Solange (yes, Beyonce’s sister) was DJing and she did a great job.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this part of the blog post: there are SEVERAL free receptions at NABJ Convention. They all include free food and music (and cough:alcohol:cough). And the networking is great! Am I making you want to go to Convention next year in New Orleans??

After that I went back to the newsroom to put the newspaper to bed and have the closing ceremony for the students. The Student Projects is already over! Saturday is a free day for us. I had so much fun working with all the students, they were an amazing group!

I went back to the hotel and we got ready for the legendary Sports Task Force party, which takes place on the Thursday of each convention. Word to the wise: please don’t drink too much.

Moving on.

That was Thursday. Friday post forthcoming!

And the pics are FINALLY posted! Here you go: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.982986794647.2404932.22621618&l=6fb6ba694d&type=1

NABJ CONVENTION DAY 3

8 am- NABJ Gospel Brunch: a wonderful event this morning featuring the beautiful Cece Winans! I really enjoyed this event and it made me feel better about not being able to go to church tomorrow lol. There was also a choir from The Rock Church in San Diego and they were fab. They were mostly white, and when they finished singing the director said, “Our group isn’t quite like yours…we aren’t journalists” hahaha maybe you had to be there.

10:30 am- First workshop of the day “Producers: The new jacks of all trades”. Great insight on how news producers have to be able to do it ALL these days. I loved the conversation, but even more so I loved the panelists! The one and only Darius Walker, CNN New York bureau chief, was there and was informative and inspirational. There were also several sports guys from Turner Sports and ESPN…and they were…nice :) Lol. They actually inspired me to make more connections with sports journalists. They work HARD and are great and what they do. Black sports journalists are a very hard working and respectable crew.

2 pm- “The Decision”: a discussion about how journalists could have/should have handled the Lebron James free agency decision. Did we so a good job covering this? Did we demonize “crazy” Cleveland fans? Have we been too critical of Lebron? Overall interesting discussion about that situation.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll notice this has been the 3rd or 4th sports reference. The NABJ Sports Task Force puts in WORK! They have some great programming and they make ALOT of money. If you’re into sports journalism, you need to rock with NABJ!

3:30 pm - NBC UnderCover premiere: the executive producer and others came to show us the hour long pilot episode. I won’t comment on the episode (lol) but after it went of we got to see the one and only Boris Kodjoe! Oh. My. Goodness. See the pics of my Facebook page!

6 pm - NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards Gala: wonderful event recognizing some of the best in journalism. Among the winners was Soledad O’Brien, who won Journalist of the Year. I also got to see a young man named Michael Feeney win Emerging Journalist of the Year. He really inspired me to go for that award in the next few years! I would absolutely love to be up on the stage soon. All of the winners were so inspiring and seemed try happy about winning their awards. They really were proud of be receiving such high recognition from other black journalists. Some of the winners can be seen here: http://nabj.org/awards/honors/index.php

10 pm - CNN Reception/Soledad O’Brien Celebration: AMAZING AMAZING networking opportunity. Every star and executive was there! I drank a few lemon drop martinis (which, might I add, didn’t really do anything to me lol) and met so many great CNN and Turner people. It was truly fabulous! Just fabulous enough for me :) Oh, and I mention it was the FORTIETH floor? Um, yeah. Talk about gorgeous views!

11:30 pm - Philly Love Party: the annual end-of-convention party, always hosted by the following year’s host center. This year it was really good, but goodness there was so much old school music! I guess most of the convention attendees were a little older than me lol. Ended up spending the last hour or so of the party hanging out and dancing with ESPN’s J.A Adande, so that was pretty awesome. It was hilarious seeing Roland Martin and other big journalists dancing on stage like a couple of promoters at the club! Roland can get it doing the Cupid’s Shuffle, by the way. I’m already ready for NABJ 2011 - Aug. 3rd to the 7th!

2 am - Associate’s Party: after the party it’s the after party! Another gathering and more time for some intoxicated networking. It was fun, and I finally met the Emerging Journalist of the Year. 

See pictures of my experiences! Facebook.com/BrittanyGeneva