Dear diary: a convention newby sees the future: overprocess this, Ruth Reichl!

Dear diary:

From the time I register at the NCEW conference late Wednesday afternoon, I'm as big a target as if Sherid Virnig had taped a "kick me" sign on my back. Instead, I'm handed a badge with a blue dot, meaning I'm new to the group, and a red dot, signaling to everyone that I'm a first-time conventioneer.

Yet no one kicks me.

Instead, folks go out of their way to be nice to me. (Of course, David Holwerk is after my money. But who am I to complain? I end up winning a TV-tray-sized Hershey's chocolate bar in NCEW's raffle--I mean "celebration.")

Wednesday night on the riverboat cruise, Dan Radmacher of The Roanoke Times is my official greeter, but I might as well have twenty or thirty. Everyone is so warm and friendly, it almost allays the dread that's been building over Thursday's daylong writing critique session I foolishly signed up for. They'll hate my work. They'll hate what I have to say about their work. They'll think I'm too mean about their work. They'll think I haven't got a clue what I'm talking about. All of which may be correct.

But what I discover--and I hope this is true of other first-timers at critique sessions--is that my colleagues are gentle, and offer great suggestions for improvement, from staying away from cumbersome paragraphs (although I think this is becoming one), to knowing when to end an editorial, to laying off unnecessary quotes. If this old dog doesn't learn new tricks, it's the old dog's fault. Thank you to session leader Mitchel Olszak and to Macarena Hernandez and Jim Lawrence for all of their kind, constructive criticism.

Since my stingy editor Doug MacEachern saw fit to give me only five hundred words to chronicle four days and I'm wasting them like a Hummer gulping gas, I'll bullet a few other highlights:

* Thursday night, Ruth Reichl makes me think about food in a whole new way. Fortunately, she waits until after we have consumed our underregulated, overprocessed, mass-produced meal to warn us of the dangers of underregulated, overprocessed, mass-produced meals, and how Big Food is lobbying Congress to make things even worse.

* After Friday morning's doom and gloom over homeland security and budget deficits, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill saves the day with his out-of-left-field prescriptions for reining in health care costs. My favorite: Make doctors print prescriptions, saving lives and money.

* Saturday's back-to-back sessions on online innovations and facing the future are what I've come to hear. I'm wowed by what other newspapers are doing online--podcasts, vodcasts, video editorials, and the like. I plan on practicing some very sincere flattery by stealing, I mean imitating, the best of what I've seen. There may even be a video editorial in my future.

* Far from being "hell with the lid off," Pittsburgh is a hip, happening city that I plan to visit again when I've actually got time to enjoy it. It makes me wish Birmingham really was "the Pittsburgh of the South."

All of this is to say my first NCEW convention far exceeded expectations. I have come back to Birmingham pumped. I have new friends to stay in touch with, new ideas to try, and a ton of milk chocolate to eat, never mind Ruth Reichl!

Bob Blalock is editorial pager editor of The Birmingham News in Alabama. E-mail bblalock@ bhamnews.com