My presentations from the 2025 CMA college media convention
posted on in: tech, journalism, academia, CMA, College Media Association and talks.
~368 words, about a 2 min read.
For years as a student I was an attendee at the New York College Media convention in Times Square, so it is always a lot of fun to get to present there to the next generation of student journalists.
The CMA conference is always one of the places where I try to keep presentations current and interesting. When I was a student, nothing irritated me more than people doing irrelevant presentations unchanged for the last 5 years. So I always try to mix things up and put together new presentations. Usually I have things pretty in progress in terms of candidates and testing by trying one or two out at Kleincamp and either refining or changing things up entirely.
This year I switched around my build-your-own-website angle based on feedback from last year and at Kleincamp. Especially with the activity of the Trump administration deleting websites and data, I thought it made more sense to focus my presentation in on the archiving parts, which had some of the best engagement last CMA. I started with three or four slides and expanded out from there.
The result is a presentation that I think got some of the most active engagement from the audience of any I've done at CMA:
Steal the Internet: Archiving Everything and Backing Up Your Investigations.
I gave the presentation I wish I had gotten from when I was a student, a low key conversation about the path from journalist to software engineering that these slides don't represent well, we had a lot of conversations throughout the talk.
My final one was the most fun to give, I reworked the ad tech 101 talk I occasionally give and collated all my digital safety resources and the presentation from last year on checking to see if your school is spying on you. Instead I talked about why journalists, and especially student journalists, can and should avoid their data being collected to track and prosecute them.
Considering campus protests and arrests I felt this one was particularly the right deck for the right moment and hopefully people got a lot out of it.