A big journalism confab to kick off 2010

Before we all disappear into the holidays, I want to put in a plug for a conference I'll be attending shortly thereafter, here in Seattle. It's called "Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" and is organized by a national organization called Journalism That Matters. Actually, they're billing it as an "un-conference," which means the agenda will evolve over a period of days:

An overall convening starts with several hundred people, then quickly self-organizes into a series of smaller interest groups which report out ideas and action steps to the whole.

It will be held Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 7-10, at the University of Washington. You need to register in advance.

Because the agenda is purposely kind of vague, an important measure of the potential impact of this conference is who will be there. It's quite a diverse bunch of more than 100 people, from big media and little media, big institutions and little institutions. A small sample, in no particular order:

Steve Bass, president and CEO of Oregon Public Broadcasting; Julie Pham, managing editor of Northwest Vietnamese News; Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog; David Beers, the founder and editor of The Tyee in Vancouver, B.C; KIRO-FM news anchor Linda Thomas; Scott Schaefer, founder, publisher, and editor of The B-Town Blog in the Seattle suburb of Burien; documentary photographer Chris Jordan; former Seattle Mayor and present Seattle Foundation President Norm Rice; Seattle Times Executive Editor David Boardman; Boardman's predecessor, Mike Fancher; Sarah Stuteville, co-founder and lead journalist of the Seattle-based Common Language Project; KUOW-FM host Ross Reynolds; Whitman College sociology professor Gilbert Mirales; and John Hamer, director of the Washington News Council.

This could be interesting.

The sponsor list is a who's who of Northwest media orgs, corporations, educators, foundations, and general do-gooders: Microsoft, the Knight Foundation, the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, the University of Washington's Department of Communications, the Washington News Council, Reclaim the Media, the Northwest Science Writers Association, the Media Giraffe Project, CityClub, the Asian American Journalists Association, Northwest Public Radio, and Washington State University.