Speaking to Nebraska Press Women
For some reason, a member of the Nebraska Press Women Association thought I’d be a good person to give a talk at their fall convention. After I finished laughing, I said I’d do it, and then began getting butterflies. I am not good at public speaking. I get nervous and start making very, very bad jokes.
And to top it all off, I completely forgot until the day before that I needed to prepare for this (to be fair, I did have a flurry of distracting things going on, like my sister’s wedding in Big Sur.)
But, I did have a jump on some things because I’d been preparing a basic blogging class for a community center. So that saved my bacon. I’m so very excited about social media stuff for journos though so I wanted to make sure I had that covered as well. This convention would be an excellent way to reach some folks in the far reaches of this big state who might not know about some of these tools.
I was told the place where they hold the con was… limited on ways I could present this sucker, so I ended up doing the dreaded powerpoint presentation. I hate powerpoint. But I did it anyway, and it did sort of help me keep my focus and stay away from bad jokes.
Here’s the presentation. Only viewable in IE I’m afraid. Thank goodness I have an IE plugin for my beloved Firefox 
I took quite a bit of information and a couple of quotes from the totally awesome beatblogging.org and graphicdesignr.net sites – hope they don’t mind. But I thought the women should know about those sites.
Overall the talk went pretty well. Even got a hug from a lovely older lady who was very excited about Twitter. There were some concerns about how to maintain journalistic integrity through an informal blog, and whether giving out real names, bios and other contact info was “safe” for some reporters (especially those covering court beats.)
I heard a lot of the same obstacle arguments I hear from my newsroom (no time, we give away too much online) which tells me that there’s still a barrier between online and print, but by the end of my talk, a lot of them were nodding their heads and seeming to sort of “get it.” Especially when I gave them the scary numbers (layoff numbers etc.)
If I didn’t want to throw up at the thought of speaking in front of people, I’d say that I wouldn’t mind doing this again. And maybe refine the talk a bit. I didn’t have much of a direction on the things they wanted to hear so I went with what I wanted to talk about I just hope they got something out of it.
