As promised, here are some more of the great tips that I picked up while at the New York Press Association's annual convention last weekend.

When most people think of the social media networks making the most noise these days, their minds instantly go to Facebook and Twitter. Those are the ones you tend to hear about most often in day-to-day life for keeping up with your friends, family, and colleagues, as well as the world.

Growing somewhat in the background for the last few years, but regularly on the mind of business professionals and job seekers versed in the digital would, was LinkedIn, a networking site which now has 70 million members worldwide.

I attended this session, led by Shannon Kinney, with fellow Record editor/community engagement guru Rebecca Eppelmann. As she has already done a great blog post on the information we took from the session, I'd recommend her post on the subject for the details.

One thing I'm interested to experiment with in regards to LinkedIn, besides getting a company page for The Record set up (if LinkedIn's customer service would stop telling me that our domain name has already been associated with another account, so we can't use it), is to see if having reporters on the site would help them grow sources they normally wouldn't find via their Facebook or Twitter accounts.


Hopefully when I find some free time (or learn what it's like to have that), I'll be able to try it out more and report back on my findings.


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Another interesting session was one put on by Doug Haddix on "Computer-Assisted Reporting," which provided a wealth of resources for tracking down the hard data that is the heart and sole of investigative journalism. Today, thanks to the massive amounts of technology we have, such data can rather easily be found online.


Rather than try to summarize all of the valuable links Doug had for everyone, here is a link where you can download both of his NYPA presentations - the one mentioned above and another on "Web for Watchdogs."


I'd recommend giving both of his presentations a read and see what you might be able to apply to your own newsroom. I know that's what I'll be doing!