by Savanah Baker
Nine graduate students attended MobileMe&You2, a conference dedicated to learning about new initiatives and innovations in mobile media. It took place in Chicago, Illinois, while being live casted to San Francisco, California, on Oct. 27-Oct. 29. Over 30 speakers attended the conference and gave insight on topics such as snap journalism, virtual reality, 360-video and drone journalism.
The conference, a partnership among the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois., was organized and founded by Professor Gary Kebbel from University of Nebraska–Lincoln and funded by the Knight Foundation, the McCormick Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
The graduate students who attended were Valeriia Alfimova, Alyssa Amen, Savanah Baker, Emily Case, Matt Knapp, Abby Meyer, Jordan Severinson, Marcell Walton and Dan Zhao. They received travel grants from the conference that fully funded their participation, as well as Graduate Chair and Professor Amy Struthers. The students worked as the communications team for the event by running the MM&Y2 social media and writing blog posts summarizing each presentation.
"Working on the media team allowed me to have real world experience with concepts I've learned in class,” Case said. “It provided a great opportunity to practice my journalistic skills and work with a team."
Baker agreed and said, “It was a really great opportunity to be able to attend and work such a unique conference. All of the communications work we did will look great on a CV, and not only were we able to gain valuable work experience, but we were able to learn, too.”
Three speakers at the conference included Professor of Practice Matt Waite and alumni Ben Kreimer and Andy Boyle.
“I love this conference,” Waite said. “I don’t think communicators have woken up to the fact how much the world has changed in terms of how people consume media…. Most people are consuming on mobile and this conference puts it front and center that the way we communicate is mobile, the way we create is increasingly becoming mobile and the method of delivery is mobile.”
Kreimer graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s CoJMC in 2013 and has since then gone on to travel the world using drones to video wildlife in Africa, capture photos during World Food Week in the Southeast Asian nation of Timor-Leste and will be going to Norway and India in coming months.
“Gary helped make the Drone Journalism Lab possible and so it’s sort of this full circle concept to me that I’m here,” Kreimer said. “It’s great to still be a part of this community and still be connected with Gary and Matt and I plan to stay connected and develop deeper ties with the college as time goes on.”
The conference attracted over 150 attendees from all over the world with some travelling as far as from Nigeria, South Africa and India. Kebbel hopes to continue the conference and further the understanding of the importance of mobile journalism.
“MobileMe&You2 was a gathering of mobile media experts from across the world who are interested in talking about best practices in mobile media,” Kebbel said. “We added topics that we thought were the most current (such as bots and Snapchat). And (next year) we will be looking at what’s new and what is happening this coming year that we haven’t even thought about yet.”
