🌿 Budding microblog

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.

Page History

This page was first added to the repository on March 3, 2025 in commit a8b31004. View the source on GitHub.

Copy this link to share with your friends.

https://aramzs.xyz/microblogs/my-presentations-from-the-2025-cma-college-media-convention/