Welcome
What is particularly unCONVENTIONal is the service provided by the students from Emerson College and their “NCA Press Project.” Log on throughout the convention to read blogs, view podcasts, and see photos of convention happenings—all of which are coordinated and carried out by Emerson students.
We look forward to your participation and hearing your comments.
Betsy Wackernagel Bach
First Vice-President and Primary Program Planner
Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to the NCA Press Project 2008, a multimedia mosaic dedicated to highlighting the activities of our organization’s San Diego Convention. Throughout the next few days, you will see students from the School of Communication at Emerson College actively involved in chronicling the panels, events, activities and participants of the largest professional communication organization in the world. This coverage will include video and audio podcasting, photography, blogging, as well as full-length coverage of major events such as the Carroll Arnold Lecture, among others. I invite you to contact me personally if you have an activity that we should cover, and while I cannot guarantee we can meet every request, our hands-on approach and objective is to provide a rich media montage of the excitement of NCA in San Diego, proudly known as America’s Finest City.
The NCA Press Project has its roots in the annual NCA convention held in Boston in November 2005. As the public affairs representative for this convention, I explored the idea of having students actively involved in promotion and coverage of events of NCA in an advocacy class I was teaching. The response of the students and the creativity of their efforts in providing an historic first for NCA with multimedia coverage, including at that time some cutting edge communication platforms, were immensely gratifying to me as their professor. It also caught the eye of NCA President Dan O’Hair, who advocated the national office continue such student centered public relations activities in the future. Thanks to the invitation of Roger Smitter and Mark Fernando at the national headquarters and the support of colleagues on the NCA Executive Committee, we are here in San Diego, thereby providing Emerson students with a fascinating case study in special event coverage of a major convention. A special thanks to Jonathon Satriale media coordinator of the project and my assistants, Konstantina Georgaki and Efe Sevin, as well as the team of Emerson students who are on the ground here for this project.
I am sure that you will find your participation in the San Diego NCA to be “unCONVENTIONal” in the dialogue and engagement so characteristic of our organization. We also hope that the NCA Press Project can facilitate your reflections of your experiences here in the months ahead when San Diego and its beautiful weather are memories we all treasure.
All the Best,
Dr. Gregory Payne
NCA Press Project Director
Emerson College