The Online News Association (ONA) had its annual shindig in New York last week (October 28-29), and commentary from the conference is starting to filter in from all the usual suspects:

Susan Mernit has details of a session on blogging best practices that included a senior CBS.com executive asking for advice on how to improve the quality of a blog and tips from a producer on how to get the newsroom involved in a blogging initiative.

Over at Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis has posted more on the ONA conference, including a post on Journalism 2010 and commentary about the keynote address from New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr..

Rafat Ali of Paid Content also gives his $0.02 on the conference. Apparently, he wasn't too impressed with the level of passion of the participants and was a bit surprised to see so few entrepreneurial go-getters at the event:

"This is perhaps the most exciting time to be an online journalist, at the most exciting time in the media sphere. Yet, at ONA, where was the passion? Where was the excitement about working in the most innovative time in the history of media? In its place what I see is self-doubt, existential crisis, a siege mentality. The media companies, yes, they're threatened, but for them, the bottomline matters, and in most cases, growing. But it is the people who work in those media companies, these journalists, who feel the most direct effect of things like blogs, the blogs beating them up, and generally, the increasing attention competition they have from all other forms of media.
At ONA, you could feel all of that."

(photo; Paid Content)