This post is sponsored by CNN Newsource

We’ve been consistently hearing that there are so many great events at ONA14, it’s hard to tell which session to attend! And while picking favorites would be impossible, we thought it might be helpful to do a deeper dive into our various conference tracks to help you determine which topics might sound most appealing.

We’ll start with our mobile track, which covers many aspects of mobile news: reporting, content distribution, technical issues and business strategy.

Many news organizations are hitting a new milestone, in which more than 50% of news content is accessed on a mobile device, rather than through a desktop browser. CNN’s Etan Horowitz, The New York Times’ Alex Hardiman, and BuzzFeed’s Alice Dubois will talk about how this shift in audience will shape both content and business strategy in the near term.

Further, as social media channels find greater audiences on mobile devices, so goes content discovery. In The Social / Mobile Mashup, Facebook’s Liz Heron and The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal will examine how the discovery and sharing of news content is increasingly tied to social media companies and their mobile offerings.

We’re also trying a new and exciting interactive series of sessions this year: our day-long mobile boot camp. It’s a crash course in a variety of useful mobile tools for reporting, including Instagram, Vine and Snapchat. We’ll also have a 3-hour course in shooting, editing, and publishing video via your phone in the afternoon. You can choose to join us for any or all of the sessions — and bring your (charged!) phone, these trainings are hands-on!

Those aren’t the only interactive sessions we’ll have. The brilliantly talented Josephine Dorado, Rebekah Monson and Sisi Wei will lead a session on designing playful interactives and games to keep news audiences engaged.

There are other ways to interact with your audience as well. McClatchy Interactive’s Damon Kiesow will present his work with iBeacons and other Bluetooth low-energy technology, which can deliver personalized messages based on a person’s location.

And what should those messages say? Find out in a frank discussion at Push Alerts: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Etan Horowitz will moderate a discussion with CBS Interactive’s Deepesh Banerji, Breaking News’ Cory Bergman and Urban Airship’s Alyssa Merritt.

Stay tuned for more in-depth dives into the program at ONA14!

Go South

The closest escape is steps from our host hotel, the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers. Take the escalators down to Riverwalk Level 1 and head for the doors facing the river. Once outside, you are on the Chicago River Esplanade, a continuous walkway with a series of landscaped plazas that runs from Lakeshore Drive to Michigan Avenue. Walking along the river’s north bank almost at water level gives you a striking perspective of the city’s famous architecture.

For more details on Chicago’s beautiful buildings, head south across the Michigan Avenue bridge and take the stairway down to Lower Wacker where you’ll find the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s River Cruise boarding area. Learn almost everything you need to know about the rise of the city’s skyline in a 90-minute boat ride.

On a related note, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is also hosting a free, custom City of Big Data Walking Tour for ONA14 attendees only at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27. Big Data Intersections investigates how data is transforming how people plan, design and build cities.  The tour is limited to 40 attendees and an RSVP is required. Get details and sign up here.

After, head over to Chicago’s best-kept pizza secret — Bella Bacinos on Wacker on the ground level of the Club Quarters Hotel. With lots of outdoor seating, you can enjoy the delights of stuffed pizza featuring the tastiest sauce in town in the company of skyscrapers (no comment on the newer guest at the table). The delicious, cheese-filled pizza takes about 30 minutes to make, so call ahead and they can have it ready when you arrive.

As you digest, you can decide what to do next:

• Go east to Millennium Park, the city’s crown jewel of green space featuring public art throughout and community events in the Pritzker Pavillion.  
• Venture south to the Art Institute of Chicago, which ranks as the city’s No. 1 attraction on TripAdvisor.
• Continue your stroll along the south bank’s Riverwalk.

Go North

ONA14’s conference hotel sits at the south end of the Magnificent Mile, a walkable, upscale shopping and dining area. Head north to take in an enormous variety of stores and end up at Water Tower Place. Yes, it is a mall. But, it has two very special features: the LEGO Store, where you can marvel at an intricate display of Chicago landmarks — made out of LEGOS (!) — and the Broadway Playhouse, where you can catch the just-opened Evil Dead: The Musical, a horror-film style comedy. 

Continuing north, you can:

• Savor drinks, apps and the view at the Signature Lounge on the 96^th floor of the Hancock Tower, the city’s fourth tallest building.
• Sip afternoon tea or evening cocktails at The Drake, a historic hotel at the north end of Mag Mile.
• Stroll on the sand of Lake Michigan’s shores at Oak Street Beach.

Go Farther

If you have some extra time on your hands and want to check out some of Chicago’s famous neighborhoods farther afield, you can:

• Head to Bridgeport on the south side, home of U.S. Cellular Field, to catch some baseball with the White Sox playing the Kansas City Royals. (The north side’s Cubs are not playing in Wrigleyville during the conference.)
• Take a beer tour with Chicago Beer Experience to try some local drinks and eats and walk the streets with someone who knows where they are going — you can’t go wrong with either the Lakeview/Lincoln Park or Buck Town/Wicker Park tours.
• Let Chicago Food Planet guide you through neighborhood cuisine at its finest. The Chinatown tour is especially delicious, but the Lincoln Park tour is the closest and shortest.

We could go on … but instead will wish you luck figuring out which of these adventures will enhance your stay in Chicago and your ONA14 experience!

Leah Rush is the ONA14 Registration Manager.

To celebrate, we want to showcase what makes ONA so special — you. Our community of digital journalists has made ONA what it is: the fastest-growing network of journalism’s digital natives, veterans and pioneers that fosters collaboration, connects innovators and inspires you to create your best work.

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Over the past 15 years, ONA has helped foster so many connections — a handshake at the conference turns into a new job, a 20-second pitch at a local meet-up leads to a new collaboration or tool, a fellowship opens doors for a young journalist starting out (or up).

We’d like to highlight these memories at this year’s conference, Sept. 25-27, as we kick off our 15th year.

• What’s your favorite ONA memory?
• What did you learn at an ONA event that changed your life?
• What’s your first memory of ONA?
• What have you picked up from the ONA community?

Send us your photos, Vines, videos, memories, anecdotes, missed connections (j/k), and favorite moments from ONA events, whether ONA Local, ONA Camps and annual conferences .

Share on Twitter and Instagram with #ThatTimeatONA.

This post is sponsored content by Tableau Public

By Ben Jones, Sr. Tableau Public Product Manager, Tableau Software (@DataRemixed)

{Note: for hands-on training with Tableau’s new Story Points feature on Mac or Windows, visit the Tableau team in the Midway at next month’s ONA14 conference in Chicago. Tableau Public is available to download for free here.}

When we released Tableau Public 8.2 in June, we were excited to give journalists around the world our new Story Points feature. Story Points lets users create a sequence of views of their data with left-to-right navigation – a “data story.”

It seemed like a perfect fit: showing one view at a time can effectively explain data, and readers are used to seeing stories presented in slideshow format. While we were excited about the possibilities, we had no idea what stories we’d see, or when journalists would begin publishing them.

It didn’t take long to get our answer. Here are three Story Points “vizzes” that caught our eye in the first month:

1. Australia’s share of the refugee burden

Two days after launch, Inga Ting of the Sydney Morning Herald published an analysis of Australia’s share of the refugee burden from three perspectives – overall, normalized by population, and by wealth:

It makes use of two challenging chart types – bubble charts and log-scale bar charts – but the point is not lost. It shows SMH readers that there is more than one way to answer a compelling question: “How do our efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis compare with other nations?”

To date, the story has been shared over 1,000 times on Facebook and has accumulated over 40,000 views. A good story is worth sharing.

2. The History of the Dow 30

Two weeks later, CNBC’s John Schoen published a stacked area chart showing almost a century of the average daily market capitalization of the Dow 30. Readers can take a stunning data-visual tour of the American economy going back to 1928. (Click the image to interact with the visualization.)

Each era has its distinct signature – the dramatic decline of “The Crash” of the early 1930s or the sudden surge of “The Tech Boom” of the 1990s. Notice that annotations are minimal. The patterns in the data speak volumes, so more words aren’t needed.

3. Gazprom’s Grip

In late July, data visualization intern and USC journalism student Li Luo of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty showed Russia’s leverage over Europe as measured by Gazprom’s grip on the industry. (Click the image to interact with the visualization.)

It answers three different questions in full visual context:

• Who pays the most for Russian gas?
• Who imports the most Russian gas?
• Who is the most dependent on Russian gas?

Do these answers comprise a story worth sharing? With over 70,000 views, 3,500 Facebook shares and almost 1,000 tweets to date, it seems that many RFE/RL readers think so.

More Award-Winning Examples

We chose each of these visualizations as Viz of the Day. and there have been many more such award-winning examples since launch. We were so impressed with the quality of data stories coming from the community of Tableau Public authors that we created a Stories Gallery.

We plans to continue to develop this feature in future releases, so it will be interesting to watch this data storytelling movement continue to grow. And if we wanted to tell the story of that growth, you know exactly what we’d do.

So far, three sessions have been affected (updated from two previously):

Fred Dust will not be able to participate in the  Saturday morning session, Building a Better Bicycle: Design Thinking and Journalism, due to a flight cancellation. Speakers Heather Chaplin and Justin Ferrell will still be speaking, moderated by Shazna Nessa.

Start Up Your Newsroom: Building your Culture, Your Team and Your Products – presenter Kara Swisher faced a significant flight delay … but made it just in time for her presentation! Lara Setrakian and Melissa Bell presented as planned.

CANCELLED: Getting Familiar with CartoDB – Amanda Hickman‘s flight was delayed and she won’t be able to lead this training.

Joshua Hatch, Chair of the Online Journalism Awards, said it all when we announced the finalists for the 2014 Online Journalism Awards yesterday:

“In case there was any doubt, this year’s finalists demonstrate that digital journalism isn’t just bells and whistles, which some think of when they think ‘digital.’ Judges saw works of original and innovative journalism that truly had no broadcast or print analogue. It’s clear that when journalists go all in on digital, they create completely new and engaging ways to tell stories and inform readers.”

Judges sorted through a record-breaking 1,084 entries from a wide range of independent, community, nonprofit, major media, start-up, academic and emerging technology organizations from around the globe. Sixty organizations are among #OJA14 finalists, representing U.S. cities big and small, and news outlets in Canada, France, Argentina, Norway and the UK, just to mention a few.

The scope and type of news organizations, reporting, visualization, tools and distribution was nothing less than staggering. Each year we update the categories to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital media industry; this year, we further emphasized data journalism, visual storytelling and investigative work with new awards specifically calling out such efforts. The new categories were an instant hit; it was as if floodgates opened to highlight emerging work in these areas.

The heft of digital journalism can also be weighed by its impressive support systems. Ten of the awards now come with a total of $52,500 in prize money, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Gannett Foundation, and the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, supporting public service, technological innovation and general excellence, and data journalism. We thank them all for recognizing the critical importance of our work.

And we extend a giant group hug to more than 50 industry-leading journalists and new media professionals who teamed up to screen entrants and select semi-finalists, and our 12 judges, representing a diverse cross-section of the industry, who then conferred to determine finalists and winners.

The best — literally — is yet to come, when we announce the results at the 2014 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet, emceed by Steve Goldbloom, on Saturday, Sept. 27, in Chicago. (Need tickets? Order here.)

But for now, congratulations to our finalists — you should be very proud of the work you’re doing on behalf of your readers and viewers, who need you now more than ever.

The Midway gets busy at ONA13 in Atlanta.

The Midway @ ONA14 will introduce a number of emerging and established tools for digital journalists in a playful, hands-on space focused on making and doing. We’re looking to connect attendees with cutting-edge technology and platforms in a fresh and fun way.

Now in its third year, this interactive space has filled up nearly three months in advance and promises to be a hopping spot at the conference. ONA attendees will be able to create and build with tomorrow’s leading apps, tools, and technology products. It’s a futures lab for media in which all programming is designed to engage.

Here’s a sneak peek at what you can look forward to at this year’s Midway.

• The Knight Foundation returns as a Midway patron sponsor, and will bring a number of their grantees to host office hours and discuss their projects.

• A virtual reality lounge and training space sponsored by Gannett and organized by Dan Pacheco, Nonny de la Pena and Lorne Covington. Make sure to also attend their session, The Holodeck is Real! How Will It Change Journalism? on Thursday, Sept 27.
• Learn how to build the perfect CMS for your news organization with Alley Interactive.
• Dive deep into big data in Tableau’s data salon.
• Learn about strategies for measuring the impact of the media you make with the Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project.
• Dissect and understand global opinions with State.com.
• Meet members of the Smart Chicago Collaborative who are transforming the Windy City with open-source apps and data that serve citizens in new ways.

Other Midway programming will be announced shortly, and includes a speakeasy (shhh!), a bullring for product demos and pitches, and more. Stay tuned for additional details.

Erin Polgreen is the ONA14 Midway Coordinator and Jessica Strelitz is ONA’s Sr. Manager, Strategic Partnerships.

NDN recruits during ONA13 in Atlanta.

We will have two sessions for recruiters and prospective candidates and students to meet, as well as professional development programming throughout the conference, including sessions such as “Real Talk: Navigating the First Years of Your Online Journalism Career” and tips for recruiting developers.

Groups that last year shared opportunities for jobs and education at the Career Fair included CNN, Raycom Media, McClatchy, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, The Wall Street Journal and Columbia Journalism School.

Attendees

Everyone at ONA14 is welcome to explore the Career Fair. If you want to connect with schools and recruiters in advance, upload your resume here. Recruiters will be available to answer your questions on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. You can also browse the Big Board, posted in the Career Fair ballroom, for additional job and educational opportunities.

Recruiters

The ONA14 Career Fair is the place to find journalists with cutting-edge media and technology skills for the positions your company will need to fill today and tomorrow, as well as potential students you want to attract to your digital media program. See more info for hours, details on the benefits of booking a table and to register. Deadline is Aug. 10.

Questions about recruiting? Can’t participate in the Career Fair at ONA14, but have positions or opportunities to promote? Please contact Jessica Strelitz for help and details on posting jobs on the ONA14 Career Big Board.

The ONA14 Career Fair is sponsored by the McClatchy Company.

Weather

Chicago is waiting for you.

It is gorgeous this week in Chicago, but will be cooler at night, so bring a sweater or light jacket. Staff can request a temperature adjustment in the meeting rooms, but everyone’s personal comfort level is different and, as a rule, hotels are kept cool. Dress for business success with professional attire during the Career Fair, don your favorite dino duds for Thursday’s Opening Night party (you’ll be meeting Sue, after all). And Saturday’s Online Journalism Awards Banquet is a great excuse to glam up, if that’s your style. Just a reminder, if you haven’t already purchased your OJA ticket, we will have a waitlist on-site at Registration for tickets to the sold-out event.

Our neighborhood

Forgot your toothbrush? Need a bottle of wine (or bourbon)? Hungry? Explore the blocks around the ONA14 host hotel, for food trucks and other eating/drinking options, Uncork-It (a wine and liquor superstore) and a large Walgreens, all within a few blocks of the hotel.

Parties, etc

Click here for all of the information on official and outside events, including our ONA14 Karaoke Bash, where you can now challenge your friends, boss or colleagues to sing (and support ONA!).

Get in line

The Registration Desk is open Wednesday, from 5 to 9 p.m., Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Find the Registration and Help Desks on the Ballroom level of the Sheraton, one floor above the Lobby — the same floor where you’ll later find the keynotes, Midway, Career Fair, sponsor lounges and our exhibitor ballroom. Pro tip: Get a jump on registration Wednesday night.

Resumes now!

We have 14 amazing schools and organizations recruiting and discussing opportunities at our Career Fair, and plenty of other groups are posting job and fellowship/award opportunities on our Big Board in Ballroom 10, so stop by on Thursday and Friday. And if you are looking for a new gig, submit your resume now so recruiters have a chance to set up conversations on-site in advance.

That’s right, you can support ONA and see some of your favorite digital journalists sing their hearts out.

Jim Brady, ONA Board member, is our first victim … we mean, volunteer. We’ve already started receiving donations to see and hear Jim sing. Add your support here.

Here’s how you can get others (or yourself) on stage:

1. Create a Challenge

Using the #ONAkaraoke hashtag, tweet a challenge to someone attending the conference to sing an artist or song; then they must accept and specify the amount they’d like to raise to sing. (Pro tip: Adding #ona14 hashtag will help get visibility.)

(e.g.: “I challenge [@user] to sing [song] at #ONAkaraoke.”

“I accept! I will sing [song or artist] for $[amount] at #ONAkaraoke.”)

Similarly, you could challenge someone to sing with you. Fun, eh?

Using the #ONAkaraoke hashtag, tweet that you will sing a certain song or artist for a specified amount (e.g. “I will sing [song or artist] at #ONAkaraoke if we can raise $[amount]).

2. Create a Fundraiser

Follow the link to our ONA karaoke event, then click “set up your fundraiser” as indicated in the screen grab to the right.

Select “start your own fundraiser” and fill out the form. For step 3 of the Crowdrise set-up, make sure to search and select “Online News Association” as the benefiting organization. You’ll be prompted to create a Crowdrise account.

Just want to donate?

You can donate to an existing campaign on Crowdrise without creating a Crowdrise account before or during the karaoke party. When you pay, you will see a 10 percent “optional processing fee” included. Don’t worry: You can click on that line to change it to $0.

We will accept cash donations at Friday night’s event to go toward existing campaigns as well as ones that are conceived on the spot. But to help keep the craziness to a minimum, we appreciate your using the online platform!

Important notes: Capacity at Lizzie McNeill’s is 250 people, so attendance is first-come, first-served.  Your ONA14 full conference badges are required for entry. You don’t have to pay to sing, but successful campaigns will get preference in the line-up.