also people who work in audience development. They’re start-ups, they’re digital, they’re mainstream – like New York Times or CNN – and they’re also local, like the Dallas Morning News. Digital has really transformed the industry, so we’re not really defined by any organisational type. It’s the individual innovating in the newsroom. For example, we have a member in a local TV station in a rural area, North Carolina, and they are currently trying to get their leadership to recognise that the organisation needs to be on social media. That’s obviously a different innovation story to what the New York Times is going through right now, but all these people are ONA members. JL You have one of the largest conferences in the industry. How did your organisation deal with being unable to meet in person over the last two years? IW Believe it or not, we had been talking about the future of conferences and events in our strategic plan, and we were going to test a virtual conference model at the end of 2020 and potentially build that out over time. Ha ha world! We have a pandemic! And so that model we were discussing literally becomes everything we do for two years, but because we had that in our strategic plan, we had some of the infrastructure already. JL So you went virtual – was it a success? IW Going virtual was still a big decision for us. We obviously didn’t have all the details worked out, but we looked at where we believed the pandemic was heading, and what we needed to do from a safety standpoint and a business standpoint, and it was successful given what we were all dealing with externally. We experimented a lot and, true to our mission, we built our own virtual
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