Registration is now open! Once again, NENPA is partnering with the New York Press Association to host a fall leadership conference for senior staff members, Thursday and Friday, September 25-26, 2025, at the Hotel Northampton, in Northampton, Mass.
This joint conference brings together publishers, editors, and newspaper leaders from across New England and New York for two days of networking, roundtable discussions, and leadership sessions focused on the critical issues shaping the future of local journalism.
To book your hotel room, please call the hotel directly at 413-584-3100 and ask for the block name under: NE/NY Press Association. Rooms are limited, so please reserve early.
Reserve Your Spot:
Meet the Speakers
Thursday, 1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Elevate Audience Engagement & Subscription Acquisitions /Renewals
Thursday, 2:45 – 3:45 p.m.
AI in the Newsroom: Leveraging AI Assistance Tools to Boost Your News Organization’s Human Intelligence
AI isn’t here to replace journalists—it’s here to enhance what we already do best. Just as spellcheck improved our copy and Photoshop refined our images, AI tools today can help us work smarter in the newsroom. From generating SEO-friendly headlines and summarizing long reports to transcribing interviews and suggesting follow-up questions, AI can streamline the routine so we can focus on the reporting that matters. It can even act as a reminder system—prompting us to clarify language, fill in context, or consider alternate angles. With clear guidelines and ethical guardrails in place, AI becomes a productivity partner, helping us produce more engaging, accurate, and audience-driven journalism.
Thursday, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Tech stacks and how they can enable success and not be a hindrance
Now or more than ever, publishers are forced to do more with less, making technology investments and efficient operations more critical than ever. In this session, we will review best practices in tech stack planning and process optimization with a focus on the “Lead-to-Cash” eco-system. In this one-hour session, you will learn:
- An overview of the “Lead-to-Cash” and why it is important.
- How to analyze your technology and platform investments.
- How to get the most out of systems you have and eliminate what you do not need.
- How to measure success with KPI’s and data.
- How to establish a plan to continuously improve, expand and tine your technology solutions.
Friday, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Going Beyond Email – Gaining Audience Engagement and Revenue with Newsletters
Matt Gross – Digital Initiatives
The Internet’s oldest technology is suddenly its hottest and most vibrant: Email. From independent journalists like Tim Mak and Ryan Broderick to up-and-coming organizations (the Free Press and the
Bulwark) to legacy media like Time, email is at the core of their efforts to reach and engage with their audiences. In this session, we’ll look at the email landscape in mid-2025: How do you build an email strategy from the ground up? What’s the difference between older platforms like Sailthru and Mailchimp and newcomers such as Substack and Beehiiv? What sort of resources do newsletters require?And how can we use email to earn revenue, expand audiences, and accomplish our journalistic goals?
Friday, 10:45 – 12:00 p.m.
Getting Started with AI Tools for News
Iain Christie – Google News Initiative
Learn more about how Google is making AI helpful for everyone through bold innovation, responsible deployment and development, all via a collaborative process. Gemini, Google’s most capable AI, can boost your productivity to help you communicate, visualize and organize across a suite of Google touchpoints. Next, Fact Check Explorer gives journalists and fact checkers a deeper way to learn about an image or topic, a handy tool in the age of mis/disinformation and AI generated content. Pinpoint’s AI features to unlock hidden stories by exploring and analysing large quantities of documents. Work with NotebookLM as your AI-powered research assistant, and use News Consumer Insights to get AI-powered recommendations to grow your audience and ad revenue!
Agenda
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025
10:00 AM — NOON
NENPA Board Meeting
NYPA Board Meeting
12:15 PM Lunch
1:30 — 5:00 PM Sessions
6:00 PM Cocktails and Dinner
Friday, Sept. 26, 2025
8:00 — 9:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM — NOON Sessions
NOON — 2:00 PM
NENPA Awards Presentation and Luncheon
NYPA Annual Meeting and Luncheon