I'm heading to New Orleans for the annual
Associated Press Managing Editors Association (APME) conference. Usually as much social as practical, this year's conference actually is perfectly focused on the goals for this "Newsroom of the Future" project.

Themed "Rejuvenate. Reinvent. Rejoice," the sessions are about recommitting to our craft and embracing our future. There will most certainly be an undercurrent of celebration as the city of New Orleans fights on in its struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina. And it makes a certain bit of sense to hold a journalism conference in a region that has experienced natural disaster because there will be much to learn about how the media responded to the crisis and how it challenged our compassion, leadership and planning.

In fact, out of Katrina came one of the most powerful examples in recent times of the need for civic journalism. With so much destroyed and in desperate need of information, residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast hungered for news, and journalists - their homes destroyed too - did their duty.

One of the sessions this week is titled, "Leadership in Trying Times: The Gulf Coast Story," featuring New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the editors of
the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss.

In what I anticipate will be one of the most meaningful aspects of the conference, Gulf Coast editors and reporters will be conducting bus tours of recovery and devastation in New Orleans and Biloxi for the visiting journalists.

So, if part of the conference is about looking back, remembering and rejoicing, then the other part is about looking forward. And as this blog has been noting for weeks, the newspaper industry is all about the future: What will it mean? What will it look like? Will we have jobs?

The keynote speaker is Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, considered one of the best newspaper Web operations in the country along. (I'll be visiting Brady's operation in November)

Brady will acknowledge that the Web feels like a threat to newspapers but should really be considered an opportunity for its "unparallel" ability to allow us to interact with readers. The Post is really doing amazing work with video and audio, but their databases most interest me because they appeal to my traditional notions. Can't join the bandwagon on podcasts and funky videos? Then how about databases that on the surface fill the practical need for information (day-care lists, voting trends, crime trends, housing prices) but below the surface lead to high-end enterprise and investigative reporting? Now THAT I can get excited about!

Among the speakers who will talk about 21st century newsrooms are editors from ChicagoCrime.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and our own Ken Sands, online publisher of spokesmanreview.com.

Also on the program are discussions about "citizen journalism" and the American Press Institute's "Newspaper Next Project." (see previous posts on both topics)

Moderators for the "New Voices, New Content" (citizen journalism) session are Jan Schaffer of the University of Maryland's J-Lab (which I'll be visiting in November) and Peggy Kuhr, from The University of Kansas, who recently allowed me to observe her Rosedale Middle School journalism project (the kids' Web site is still a work in progress).

In all, this APME conference should be both informative and inspiring. With sessions titled, "Building Trust in the News: 101 + Good Ideas;" "Winning Back Women Readers," and "When Cultures Collide: Combining Web/Print Newsrooms," how could there not be at least a couple practical tips to steal?