ONA Chicago: We're all growns up!

Let me preface the following couple of paragraphs by saying that I flew to Chicago to attend the fourth annual Online News Association conference shortly after my wedding, so I've had a lot of thoughts running through my head about "maturity" and "life stages" and how taking that step in one's life has a lot to do with forging one's own identity.

Looking back on the two days I spent near Northwestern University, it hit me that such phrases also apply to how online journalists see themselves with the dot-com bubble firmly in the rear-view mirror.

While defining online news these days isn't easy, it's clear that the myriad of sites out there have made considerable efforts to forge their own identities and not be typecast by all the characteristics of their parent organizations.

It's impossible to catch all that is said when three panel discussions are occurring simultaneously. But the lasting impression I got from Chicago (aside from the numerous watering holes and how long it takes to go from Evanston to downtown Chicago in a bright yellow school bus) is that more sites are focused on finding their own voices than on the minutia of posting content.

There were many references to how online journalism is now "mainstream." One participant, MSNBC.com VP and Editor in Chief Dean Wright, even asked for help in his crusade to wipe out the phrase "new media" from the lexicon. [Disclosure: Wright is a member of The Media Center's advisory board.]

"I've come to the realization that we are decidedly in the mainstream now," Wright said. "We saw during the Iraq war a real tipping point ... where we really enabled people to be involved ... in a way that they weren't before."

Almost everywhere I turned, I heard examples of how drastically online news differs from that provided by traditional newspapers. And while a speaker like blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan is an easy example to point to, there were also several examples of how sites attached to newspapers prevent themselves from getting fenced in by the traditions of the printed product's culture.

Some, to be sure, were more amusing than others. Rob Curley, general manager of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal - World's World Online, got several laughs from rattling off the times he was sure he'd get fired — but didn't — for the chances he and his staff took while trying to attract a young audience. Among the bullets dodged, Curley survived the head generated from a blogger's post to the site following a Kelly Osbourne concert in Lawrence that said, in part "Thank God fat white chicks with no talent now have a role model."

Other attempts were more subtle, but just as relevant. Teresa Hanafin, editor of Boston.com, challenged attendees to try new homepage approaches on the weekends, when news sites typically suffer a fall-off in traffic. While posting big feature packages on the home page above breaking news on the weekends might irk some, it's part of the site's larger goal to forge its own identity.

Said Hanafin: "At the end of the day, I don't want our users to say Boston.com is a great news site. I don't even want them to say Boston.com is the Globe's news site. I want them to say that Boston.com is my Web site. And then I'll know that we've succeeded, because of all of the satisfaction and intimacy that that sentence implies. That's what I want to hear."