Attending a professional conference as a tech journalist is a frenetic experience. You have to 1) pay attention to what’s going on, 2) try to talk to sources if you’re there in person, 3) write articles on deadline, and 4) keep up a steady stream of social media posts if you want to burnish your “personal brand” and promote your publication/website.
This week I “attended” my first conference since retiring: PositConf 2024, a data science event hosted by Posit (formerly RStudio) that focuses on the R and Python programming languages.
One of the big benefits of attending as a retiree was being able to pick whatever sessions interested me, instead of focusing on ones that I thought would be most important for my job. In the past, I sometimes missed sessions on topics that interested me personally, such as mapping or working with election data, in order to cover things that might be a better fit for our audience of corporate IT professionals.
This week, though, even if something might be useful for enterprise tech pros or even newsworthy, I could choose a competing session if it interested me more. And, I didn’t have to worry about writing stories between sessions.
I still microblogged the conference on Mastodon and LinkedIn. That kept me plenty busy while also trying not to miss what was happening in real time. I ended up posting 28 times on Mastodon for #PositConf2024 another 18 on LinkedIn. Some of those posts included screen shots, which also meant writing alt text. Before the conference I also created an app to aggregate all Mastodon posts about the conference in a searchable table (I’m no longer active on Twitter).
It wasn’t like being a full-time reporter. But especially compared to my prior week and a half of mellow retirement, it was still pretty busy. Since the conference was on West Coast time, I at lunch while watching presentations online and crammed dinners into 20-minute breaks between sessions. But even with all that, it was a lower stress experience. I didn’t have to worry about missing something important in real time, and thus missing a potentially big story. Sessions were recorded, so I can watch anything I missed at my leisure.
Part of me did miss the adrenaline rush of filing stories on deadline, though. And, I missed the “importance” of writing news that a global publisher would send out to its many email newsletter subscribers. I also had a pang when filling out my Discord server profile, now that my professional bio is mostly past accomplishments without a current company or title.
But did I miss those things enough to want to work 40+ hours a week again? No, I did not.
Might I want to cover a conference again someday as a freelance writer? Possibly.
But not yet.
Even with two full conference days, my days as a retired conference attendee had a different rhythm than if I’d been working.
Since things kicked off at noon local time on the first day, my morning was free. So, I took a bike ride to a nearby botanical garden and a short hike to enjoy nature before the opening keynote. The second day I went with my husband to the Mass. Horticultural Society’s Sunflower Extravaganza in the morning, walking through a field of flowers before my hours of screen time began. During the lunch break at 3 pm local time on the second conference day . . . I got a haircut.
I suppose in theory I could have done all that in the mornings even if I’d been a full-time employee while at the conference. But I know what would have been more likely: dealing with work email, possibly answering can’t-wait questions, maybe even calling into AM meetings.
To be clear, I don’t regret all the events I attended as a journalist. I really enjoyed them! It wasn’t only the rush of deadline writing I loved, but also being able to inform and educate our readers. I may do that again from time to time someday as a freelancer. Or I may do things like that only on my own hobby websites and social media.
Whatever news writing might be in store for me in this next chapter, though, it will be different. And that’s OK.
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