Rebekah Monson, communications manager at the University of Miami School of Communication, is co-captain of the Code for Miami Code for America brigade and an organizer of Hacks/Hackers Miami. Below, she writes about attending her first News Foo, a gathering of people in the digital news space organized by Knight Foundation, O’Reilly Media and Google. Photo credit: Flickr user Bilal Kamoon.

At News Foo this month, I heard that a human brain contains more synapses than the universe has galaxies. It was a funny factoid to ponder at that particular event, since I’m pretty sure I shot enough electricity through my own meager neural network to light downtown Phoenix while I was there.

News Foo is an unconference for journalists, technologists and leaders in public policy about the future of news. There are no keynote speakers, no pre-planned sessions, and, thankfully, no bad slide presentations. Attendees make the schedule on the first day, and usually create sessions they’d like to attend as often as they create sessions they’d like to lead. The result is a format that favors cultivating conversation and sharing ideas over broadcasting expertise.

News Foo is kept intentionally small; the organizers, O’Reilly Media, Knight Foundation and Google, invite about 150 participants. Most news nerds are generally welcoming, with an open-source bent, so the idea of an invitation-only event makes many a bit squeamish. But the scale allows for more discussion and, I believe, more candor.

The organizers share this aversion to exclusivity, so they shake up the guest list each year. Just less than half the participants are noobs like me, and I guess slightly more than half are curious about why they are there in the first place. (Fig. 1: An Emotional Map of the News Foo Conference, via The Foonix, the zine of News Foo 2013.) The people who know why they’re there, well, they’re the core ethos of the thing: perennial innovators, news leaders and tech rock stars such as Sue Gardner, Andy Carvin, Eli Pariser, Vivian Schiller, Krishna Bharat, Jennifer 8. Lee, well, this could go on forever. Anyway, knowing that you probably won’t be invited back to the rock star hangout really encourages one to take advantage of the temporary access.

So I listened hard and spoke up some too, and News Foo overloaded my brain in the best possible way. I left with more interesting questions than I brought, which to me is a measure of how much my curiosity was stoked, and a predictor of how much I’ll do with what I learned. In the interest of sharing that experience, here are five questions that have been swirling around my brain since News Foo:

1. How should we protect ourselves? (Thanks, NSA.)  Several sessions circled around online security concerns, specifically protecting information and sources. “Burner” phones and laptops are becoming as important for reporters as they once were for corner boys. Tools aimed at privacy (see Tor) and encryption strategies are spreading through news orgs and reporters are relying more on low-tech solutions like face-to-face meets and drops. If you’re dealing with these issues, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a wealth of information about how to protect your privacy online.
2. How do we reconcile complexity and atomization?  We know that users find value in a broad range of individual pieces of content — tweets, videos, databases, graphics, comment exchanges, written narratives, or anything else we use to communicate — but we’re still learning how to use these individual items in ways that tell complete, context-rich stories and experiences. And how can we extend that thinking in ways that permeate throughout entire products and brands? It’s a complicated issue and some innovative work of the past few years—such as cir.ca, Vox Media’s Story Streams and (sorry) “Snowfall”— tests different approaches. Both the desire for immediate bits of information and the need for greater context are increasing. While there are no specific formulas to perfectly mesh these two ideas yet, the room for experimentation is wide open and the solutions are changing everything about our work.
3. How can we get native advertising right?  Most everyone in the news business is talking native ads (loosely, those are ads injected into your main content feed), because there can be a lot of money in them. But all that revenue carries editorial concerns. Discussion swirled around ethics, quality, search, integrity, disclosure and history. (As I heard in one session, what are native ads if not a return to “old-time radio” advertising models?) Consensus coalesced around a need for better human- and machine-recognizable disclosure, and I heard some intriguing ideas that could help improve and standardize how media might do that in the future.
4. How can we engage?  I admit that I am deeply, perhaps overly, interested in how and why news can inspire civic action. I’ll skip over the inevitable objectivity versus advocacy argument, because I think many journalists can agree that we spends tons of resources on what we believe is important work and get inconsistent results when it comes to policy changes or civic action. The good news is that many journalists are digging way past the false assumption that social media and technology magically solve our engagement problems. Rather, they’re considering how baking deeper engagement opportunities into stories and building or supporting communities creates better journalism.
5. How does hardware change humans?  One of the most interesting sessions I attended was called “Is memory dead?” We discussed how we have outsourced memory to our devices, calendars, photo feeds, social media, etc. I left thinking about how we use our technologies as a sort of memory index — both a shorthand and a collection of data. Another popular session, “Chip in the brain,” pushed people to think beyond wearables and consider implications that biologically embedded technology might have on our society as well as on our business. There was plenty of talk about the next phase of work with drones and sensors, too. (If anyone has great news ideas for CubeSats, please share.) Innovation is constant, and these conversations gave me hope that we’re getting better at pivoting with it.

Back here in the real world, my journalism friends and I frequently discuss layoffs, closures, reorganizations and the lesser strata of impending industry doom. The absence of all the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing about saving this or the decline of that was, to me and to many who have attended before me, the most refreshing aspect of News Foo. It is, really, about the future of news.

By now journalists stay in news because we love it and we know it has a future. We don’t know exactly what that future is, but we have work to do and we have ideas about how to do it better. There are often more questions than answers, but questions are opportunities to innovate. The best thing that I learned among the news nerd rock stars at News Foo is that we’ll never get to innovating until we stop focusing on our obstacles and start chasing our opportunities.