Enthusiasm and dynamic, focused discussions marked last week’s Online News Association09 Conference and Awards Ceremony in San Francisco, in sharp contrast to other gatherings of journalists that I have attended this year. One might say it almost seemed like “irrational exuberance.”

My past two summer workshop projects have involved efforts to create multimedia stories using a mix of still photography and audio in one case and video in the other. Each was seeking to address broad, big themes by finding individual situations or characters as subjects who could then provide a way into the story.

Participants grappled with the challenge of transforming big themes into multimedia stories that could be appreciated and assimilated by the audience. In that effort, I saw interesting patterns emerge as the challenges needing to be met by the students.

As we prepared for the VJ workshop at Brooks Institute I had multiple e-mail conversations with Paul Myers, a professor there. We discussed a theme for my individual talk and overall aspirations for the project.

In the past two weeks, I have been on both coasts looking at the impact of job losses in journalism created by the current economy. Last week, I worked as a story coach at a multimedia workshop for out-of-work newspaper visual journalists and students, hosted and organized by faculty and staff at the Brooks Institute. This week, I have been attending the annual conference of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication in Boston.

When I was initially invited by Javier Errea, Communications professor at the Universidad de Navarra, to be a judge and juror at the Malofiej design conference in Pamplona, Spain, I was both delighted and filled with some trepidation, knowing my own visual journalism background was premised on familiarity with still photography and video rather than information graphics per se.