As expected, journalists began coming in droves to Unity on Wednesday night and Thursdau morning. The downtown Chicago hotels are packed with Black, White, Hispanic, Asian and Native American Journalists. At the Chicago Hyatt, where I’m staying, the Big Ten Conference is also holdng its annual football press preview. I heard Joe Paterno held a press conference in my hotel. If I had the chance I would have asked him why he didn’t recruit me to play for Penn State when I was in high school? I had good speed and GREAT hands. Now on to Unity:Day 2. I couldn’t get to everything I wanted to today. As one of my last acts as Assistant Dean at Quinnipiac, I’ve been spending a lot of time at our booth trying to recruit working journalists to take a look at the Graduate Interactive Communicatins program. We’ve created an entirely online version of the program and it’s just the training working journalist need to stay competitive in today’s media world. I did get a chance to check out one of the most popular workshops of the day: Activism and Blogging. I spoke with one of the panelists, Howard Witt, Southwest Bureau Chief, Chicago Tribune. Witt was one of, if not the first, national journalists to report on the Jena, Lousinanna racial incident that dominated the news last year. Witt isn’a blogger, but he’s the type of journalist bloggers love. He may be mainstream, but he get’s what’s going on. Witt told me he won’t be blogging anytime soon, becaue it would take too much time away from his family. I guess the other big buzz of the day came when Senegal president Abdoulaye Wade said he doens’t care if Barack Obama is elected President of the United States. He said there are no guarantees that Obama would be a great friend to Africa. And finally today, it seems like every convention or conference I attend there is always a theme attached. Unity is no different, but today was the first time I really paid attention to this year’s Unity theme: “A New Journalism for a Changing World.” I agree the world is changing, but a new journalism? I need to chew on that one for a minute. Yes, the way news is gathered and delivered has changed, but a new journalism? I think good journalsm is seperate from the tools we use to collect and edit information. I think its the journalists that have to change and adapt, not the journalism.