Don’t forget to make your travel arragnments soon, to keep the cost down.

CUNY is trying to get a group deal for hotel rooms in New York close to the conference (Times Square) but Frankly, the rates on Hotels.com are better.

We may have a group deal for a Mariott Courtyard and if we do, we will pass along the information.

If you know of any deals, please share your notes by commenting below.

Below is the first post in preparation for the News Innovation Conference on network journalism. If you want to dive straight in, check out our introductory post on Baristanet.

If you want to find out about what you can expect from this blog, read below the fold.

More…The upcoming conference in New York is all about next steps. Where do we go from here?

But before we gather with future partners to decide what those steps will be, we will take the first two-thirds of the day to share lessons learned, best practices and inspiration from past projects in the world of network journalism.

The day will be filled with conversations that will be lead by people who have had experiences running hyperlocal blogs, created citizen journalism networks and experimented with new business models. We have a lot we can learn from each other.

The purpose of this blog is to break the ice a bit, so everyone has some familiarity with the big issues that these individuals have already tackled and the lessons they have learned. This way, the day of the conference we won’t have to start from square-one.

The blog posts will provide an introduction to some of the many interesting examples of network journalism, including a brief narrative of how they came to be. Each post will try to answer the following about a project or person.

* A main goal
* Notable achievements
* Surprising realizations
* Lessons learned or mistakes made
* The business model used
* Plans for the future
* What they hope to take away from the conference

In answering these questions we’ve tried to keep the language and tone as true to the speakers voice as possible. These posts are not analysis, they are the beginnings of a conversation that we will pick up October 10th, at the News Innovation Conference.