The Jazz Journalists Association has scheduled a multi-faceted professional conference for Jan 8 – 12 in NYC, concurrent with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference (which is producing a Special Focus on Jazz), the two-night multi-venue Winter Jazzfest, one-night but multi-stage globalFEST, and the Nat’l Endowment of the Arts’s presentation of 2010’s Jazz Masters. It’s the first time the JJA (of which I’m president) has worked in conjunction with APAP and the NEA to bring the people who disseminate music news together with those who seek to make it.
Free and open to the public, three JJA meetings on issues facing writers, photographers, broadcasters and webcasters take place in the Sheraton NY and Towers, 811 7th Ave. Our hands-on workshops on video for the web and blog basics are being held offsite (respectively at the midtown Training Center of the Mediakite production services firm and at the New School Jazz performance space) and require pre-registration as do the Jazz Masters sessions. The two related APAP forums that are open to everybody also request that reservations be made. Oh, we’re having a cocktail party, too, and the NEA is generously hosting a lunch for jazz journalists. Here again is the link to details on these events.
If this announcement seems a tad last-minute for such a full program, please know that the JJA planned it all months back, but was stymied by rejection of grant applications to support the conference from three separate funding organizations. The rejections were kind and understandable, but required our organization to downscale its presentations and especially the number of journalists involved, since we originally wanted to involve arts reporters from diverse genres as most everyone covering the musical arts and industries faces similar challenges in the current mediascape. Well, the meeting room which APAP has graciously given the JJA for its January meetings will hold 40 to 50 people, so we’ve waited to put out the word, hoping still to attract attendees but knowing that a vast crowd can’t really be accommodated.
Never mind — are you a jazz journalist, in NYC-vicinity next weekend? Want to attend and/or participate in the JJA’s meetings? Leave a comment below or email me at President@JazzJournalists.org. Information on documentation of this conference is to be announced; watch this space!