It's NENMA meetup season!

Come one, come all, to the second annual NENMA meetup in CT, the first stop on our 3-city 2009 networking tour!

That's right. As promised, your NENMA board is taking its show on the road again this year and spreading new media goodness across the region. We had such a great time -- and fantastic turnout -- in Rocky Hill last year, that we're making it the first stop on our reunion tour. Whether you're deeply mired in paid content debates, four-legged sales calls, multimedia convergence, Twitter training, or something so new that we don't even have a buzzword for it yet (that means you, Jennifer Preston!), please join us. And please, bring friends, colleagues and anyone who you think can teach us a thing or two about new media.

The details:

What: NENMA Southern New England networking
Who: Everyone in the local online news world -- and then some.
When: 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, June 18
Where: Wood-n-Tap Bar & Grill, 12 Town Line Road, Rocky Hill, CT
URL: http://www.woodntap.com/rockyhill.htm
Details: We weren't able to reserve the back room, so we'll just take over the bar area. Just look for my shaved head atop a Hawaiin shirt. We'll cover the appetizers. You'll have to cover your bar tab.
Time Check: About 10 minutes from Hartford, 35 from New Haven, 40 from Springfield (assuming no traffic issues)

Look forward to seeing anyone that can make it.

Should you be booked for that date, two more networking events are nigh:
Aug 20: NENMA Greater Boston networking (exact location TBA)
Oct. 22: NENMA Northern New England networking, Manchester, NH (exact location TBA)

And don't forget to mark the calendar for the fall conference, focused on SEO, slated for Nov. 19.

See you soon!
--
Sean Polay
Product Manager, Distributed Media
Dow Jones Local Media Group
Ottaway Newspapers, Inc.
sean.polay@dowjones.com | 774.313.6093 | Gtalk: sean.polay

Web Ad Design Seminar

New England Newspaper Operations Association (NOA) will conduct a seminar on Web Ad Design Thursday, May 21, at the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass.

The program will run from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with time out for light lunch (provided). The program is aimed at newspaper graphic artists and anyone else who is involved in the production of advertising for the web.

The featured speakers are Bill Ostendorf, president of Creative Circle Media Consulting, who has helped redesign over 300 publications and web sites and who has led consulting and training projects all over the world ... and Taylor Esteves-Pearce, formerly of GateHouse Media New England, a specialist with extensive real world experience designing ads with Photoshop, Flash and other forms of rich media.

Here are the topics:

* Web ads versus print ads
* Designing ads that deliver results
* Common misconceptions of web ad design
* Innovative placement of online advertising
* Overview of software available for web design
* Web design trends
* Photoshop tutorial ... how it can be used for web design
* Flash tutorial ... introduction to the program, overview of the tools, and basic ad design


The cost of admission is $40 for first registrant, $25 thereafter for additional sign-ups from same paper or company. Includes lunch. Complete the registration form here and return to NOA by regular mail at: 70 Washington St., Salem, MA 01970...by fax to: 978-744-0333...or by e-mail to nena@nenews.org.


Note: The Eagle-Tribune is located at: 100 Turnpike St., No. Andover, MA 01845, Tel.: 978-946-2000. Get directions at their website: www.eagletribune.com

Boston.com wins 2 EPpies

Congratulations to Boston.com -- and in particular NENMA board member Courtney Hollands, who is part of the Things To Do team at Boston.com -- for their double-EPpy win, announced today in New Orleans:

Web site of the Boston Globe, the newspaper whose future was still in doubt until early Wednesday morning, took home two of the five awards for which it was a finalist: Best Sports Blog, (for Globe sportswriter Tony Massarotti’s blog, “Mazz”); and Best Entertainment Web Site (with more than one million unique monthly visitors), a category in which its two finalists, Boston.com/ThingsToDo and Boston.com/ae (Arts & Entertainment), tied for the win. Boston.com had two of the three finalists in the latter category.

Former NENMA and NENA keynote Rob Curley and his team at Greenspun Interactive in Las Vegas also took home 2 awards.

Though most of us NENMA members could not make it to New Orleans for the Interactive Media Conference, we still do our best to bring the cream of the digital crop right to your doorstep whenever possible. Sure, you didn't need four EPpies to convince you of that, but it certainly doesn't hurt!