NENMA in 2009: Renew now!

We’ve returned to the time of year when we recap for you what we’ve accomplished as an organization the prior year, and let you know our intentions for the coming year. From that, we hope you glean that you received tremendous value for your dues and participation last year, leading you to renew without a moment’s hesitation.

Suddenly, though, even our incredibly affordable annual membership undoubtedly is looking ripe as another place to trim expense in your annual budget. Does it make any sense to join a trade association in times such as these?

I’ll be honest: This is the first year I will skip the Newspaper Association of America annual interactive conference in more than 7 years. In fact, I’ve sworn off newspaper conferences outside of New England entirely. Maybe I’m too grizzled an online veteran – now with more than 11 years of digital work under my belt – to get much more value out of the panels, keynotes and buzz sessions at such events. While I will miss the networking opportunities, I find myself thirsting for knowledge that can only be acquired outside of our industry.

Last year I attended the inaugural Inbound Marketing Summit in Cambridge, and this year I traded my NAA expense to go to the annual Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. Both experiences affirmed for me that I have much more to learn, especially if I turn my gaze away from my proverbial newspaper navel and expand my horizon to learn from and network with web metrics analysts, search engine optimization practitioners, independent bloggers, new media marketers, and more.

And that is why the New England New Media Association could be the best investment you could make all year.

Here’s what we accomplished last year:

• Changed our bylaws to welcome non-newspapers members to the organization and to hold leadership positions. As we noted in last year’s letter, we’ve seen that some of the best contributions to our recent conferences have come from guests – panelists, speakers or otherwise – outside of the newspaper industry. Given that we are a “new media” association, limiting membership to newspaper employees and directly affiliated interactive teams was limiting our ability to expand regular and frequent knowledge-sharing with those outside of our traditional media culture.
• In that vein, we mixed some of our best and brightest New England new media peers at our fall conference with a multitude of panelists from outside of the industry, including:
• Steve Garfield, video blogger extraordinaire, media company advisor and Boston University teacher.
• David Jackel and Shana Bethune of Shave Media, a Boston-based video production company that has been specializing in 60-second online video "documentaries" for advertisers.
• Amy Derjue, blogger for Boston Magazine’s Boston Daily (she has since made a career change).
• Bill Gaffney, regional interactive director for Providence-based LIN Television.
• Malcolm Lewis, vice president and general manager for private label of Local.com.
• Dave Hendricks, executive vice president of operations for Datran Media, overseeing the company’s e-mail, display and list management businesses.
• Held networking meetups in five of the six New England states (photos from NH, photos from CT, photos from ME). It was great fun to get out and mingle with so many of you – and even some folks who’d never been members before – at these events.
• Helped the New England Advertising Executives Association and New England Society of Newspaper Editors book digital media-focused panels for their annual conferences.
• Co-sponsored a “Reader Comments on the Web” seminar along with NENA, NEPA and law firm of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye.
• Promoted the opportunity to attend webinars led by Borrell Associates in conjunction with NENA and the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.
• Launched a new Web site at http://www.nenma.org/ on the backbone of Blogger, greatly simplifying administration for us while making the site more reflective of the new media culture we’re trying to foster. The site includes dynamic blog and jobs feeds, along with adding listserv signup and easier photo and video embedding capabilities.

So what’s in store for this year? We’ve already got a multi-track spring conference in the works for April 30, with one of the tracks including a new media sales boot camp. We’ll follow that up in the fall on Nov. 19 with a search engine optimization boot camp and related seminars.

In between, we’ll pepper the calendar with another round of meetups, likely to be in June, August and October in southern New England, the greater Boston area, and northern New England, respectively. We’ll continue to work with our sister newspaper organizations to schedule new media programming for their events, while also looking for opportunities to partner with non-newspaper organizations to promote training and networking opportunities outside of our core industry.

And we’ll continue to foster networking, whether via the listserv, on Twitter, in the blog comments, over on Facebook, and even on LinkedIn.

Those of us involved in NENMA’s founding did so because we knew not everyone at New England newspapers can afford to attend events outside of the region. Our core mission has always been to bring the learning opportunities from outside the region to us, whether we’re booking high-profile guests for our conferences or by sharing our common challenges and successes with each other. Never has that been more important than right now.

Please renew your membership today for just the $125 annual fee per media organization. Once your media organization is a member, any number of employees from that organization may join our listserv and receive discounts on conference and seminar registrations.

In doing so, please let us know how we’re doing, and what new initiatives we should be trying. We very much look forward to seeing you at this year’s events, and conversing with you in the meantime.

Sincerely,
Sean Polay
NENMA President