Why sponsor SRCCON now

For journalism-technologists and newsroom leaders, SRCCON is a place to “recharge, reset, and reimagine.” You can help make that happen.

SRCCON is a journalism conference people love. This reaction comes from the approach SRCCON takes: highly participatory and extraordinarily inclusive. We’re grateful for the support of sponsors in helping make this event possible.

As one attendee put it, SRCCON​ “made me more confident about my media, my future, made me realize I was not alone in my view of journalism, it gave me hope for a journalism that truly represents me!”

Ways to sponsor SRCCON and help make it possible

We’re seeking sponsors for SRCCON 2023, which will host 300 participants in Minneapolis on October 17-18. Available sponsorships include:

👏 PARTNERSHIP SPONSORS

Support all aspects of the conference planning and program. Partnership sponsors have maximum visibility—your support makes SRCCON possible.

👉 ACCESSIBILITY SPONSORS

You’re directly supporting our live transcription and scholarship programs. Accessibility is one of our most visible sponsorships across the entire program—because you are helping us make SRCCON available to as many people as possible.

🙌 MEAL AND BREAK SPONSORS

Help keep attendees nourished throughout the event, and create spaces for attendees over food and drink. We know that these spaces have created lifelong connections between participants, and are extremely meaningful.

👌 EVENT SPONSORS

Help us with all the finishing touches on the event. Show your support by helping us put on what our participants frequently say is “the best conference I’ve ever been to.”

Each sponsorship includes at least 1 free ticket and different types of visibility and recognition throughout the event. Contact Ryan Pitts for a full kit with pricing and further details. We love chatting with folks to find the best way we can collaborate to welcome your team to the event and make it inclusive for all attendees!

What is SRCCON?

OpenNews has been hosting SRCCON annually since 2014, and added a series of smaller, topical conferences starting in 2017. At SRCCON events, participants come first so they can focus on collaborating on the work at hand. Over this time SRCCON has:

• Welcomed nearly 3,000 participants, with a healthy mix of new and returning attendees each time.
• Hosted more than 700 interactive, collaborative sessions on topics ranging from archiving and algorithms to management and self-care.
• Provided scholarship support to help hundreds of participants and facilitators attend these events.
• Operated with inclusion and accessibility as core design features, providing live transcription, childcare, tasty food and drink for all dietary needs, and a schedule with space to refresh and connect. This year, we’re planning to offer digital accessibility across international timezones, and intentional programming for how attendees can digitally connect based on their needs.
• Created a code of conduct and incident response plan that supports attendees and has influenced the journalism community, including ONA and IRE conferences.
• Led to countless job connections, innovative project ideas and collaborations, and new organizational policies on hiring, inclusion, mentorship, workflow, development processes, and more.

Who attends and why

People come first at SRCCON. Each event is set up to allow participants to focus on getting to know each other and learn from the wisdom in the room. About a third of participants also facilitate sessions, leading conversations and skillshares that help people bring new ideas and experience back to their newsrooms.

The typical SRCCON audience and program

• Over half of attendees identify as women and a third as people of color.
• About a third of participants are in leadership roles.
• About a third are developers or engineers.
• Other roles include data journalists, designers, product managers, and reporters.
• The diversity of attendees also includes the size and nature of the organizations that attendees represent, including staff from large and small companies that are, or work with, news organizations—including attendees from tech companies, universities and colleges and more.
• Sessions dig into best practices for all kinds of teams and so many techniques, including sustaining diversity efforts, supporting colleagues through grief, managing COVID-19 data projects, working on data with editors without a data background, developing skills as a manager, and more.
• A schedule designed around our facilitated session format enables attendees to engage deeply in a purposeful way.

“You all are leading the way on how to have a great conference that is welcoming for everyone, and someday the tech industry will be so much better off when it adopts what you’ve done.”

“This was the first conference I’ve been a part of where I felt I belonged on every level.”

“My job very much straddles the line between technology and the newsroom and in 20 years of being in the newspaper (media) business, this is the first conference I’ve been to that I felt like was specifically for me. I could contribute meaningfully to every session I went to.”

Interested in having your company or organization become a sponsor of SRCCON? Get in touch with OpenNews Co-Director Ryan Pitts today.