This is going to be brief. I am in the middle of the Media 2009 Conference here in Athens. I present my paper tomorrow.

I was pretty excited to be able to meet the US Ambassador to Greece, Daniel Speckhard and his wife. Kim and I attended a reception this evening for the conference at a restaurant in the shadow of the Acropolis. We were outside on the restaurant terrace, and it was a beautiful evening.

On the left is Tom Miller, Counselor for Public Affairs at the Embassy and on the right is Jim Roberts, Editor of Digital News at the New York Times, who has been one of the panelists at the opening session Wednesday evening.

I'm enjoying the conference, but being me, I have to gripe about a couple of things. First, time is really not that relevant to Greeks. Little at the conference has been "on time," but if I really want to be fair, what does it matter? The second criticism is the fact that most of the presenters had no idea how to correctly use PowerPoint. I can't tell you the number of slides today that must've had 50 words on them. And in many cases, the presenters felt compelled to read them to us! Aargh!


Tom's out of focus, but you should be able to see Nikos Leandros, a professor here in Athens and the conference coordinator. Nikos will be in Boston on a Fulbright in October.


This morning conference registration was scheduled to be 8-9 a.m. I hate having to be in line, and I get up early, so I got to the convention center about 8:15. They weren't ready. It was about 8:35 before they were ready to check anybody in.


The conference kicked off with a panel discussion ab out online journalism, business models and the future, with representatives from the NY Times, The Guardian (UK) and El Pais (Spain). Once they ironed out the technical difficulties of the translation headsets, it was a good discussion.

I knew one American who was here for the conference - my old BEA friend Alan Albarran from University of North Texas. Alan presented on one of the first panels of the day. All day two panels ran concurrently - one in French, one English. Guess where I spent the day.

While Alan and I spent the day at the conference, Kim volunteered to show Alan's wife Beverly around town. This did some museum time, saw the changing of the guard, ate and did some shopping. When the sessions ended we had a couple of hours before the evening reception, so we all got together at a cafe. Kim played each of them a game of backgammon (she went 1-1) as we sat, watched the people and just relaxed. I know it sounds funny to relax before attending a reception, but we didn't sit for the whole two hours.

It's late. I probably won't blog tomorrow.