Hello everyone! It's great to be back! Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to take my first trip to Chicago, IL. I was there for the UNITY Journalists of Color convention. It was amazing!! What an experience to mingle with other journalists. The convention was 5 days long with over a hundred panels and thousands of journalists in attendance. I also got a chance to attend media receptions hosted by all the networks and a bunch of other events/ opportunities to interact with other journalists. By the way, remember our intern Alissa Dos Santos? She was there too!

The Unity organization was founded in 1994 and has since been meeting every four years. It's the largest convention for journalists of color that's including the Native American, Asian, Hispanic and African American journalism organizations combined. The purpose was to discuss issues that are affecting journalism and communities today and how we as journalists are reporting it. How can we better reporting? How can we educate each other? Panels and panels on end. They were all wonderful. One panel was geared toward covering stories overseas, one on the digital age just an abundance of all sorts of educational sessions.

I was there representing the U.S. Army and participated in a panel geared toward the media coverage of minorities in the military. Since I have the journalism and military background it came easy.

The individual organizations have conferences every year. But, like I wrote earlier, UNITY is only every four years. If you would like information links are below.

http://www.2008unity.org/

http://www.nahj.org/home/home.shtml

http://nabj.org/index.php

http://www.aaja.org/

http://www.naja.com/

~Stephanie