Mega-Conference Lives up to its Name:  Mega-conference will become the biggest annual event in the newspaper industry in 2018.  The News Media Alliance (formerly NAA) will abandon its mediaXchange event and become a partner, increasing Mega-Conference’s expected attendance to 900 attendees when it heads to San Diego from 26 – 28 February. Attendees are owners, publishers, digital officers or revenue officers of media operations with both print and digital assets, serving their local communities.

I Think I Cannes: Last week during Mipcom the conference producers announced that they would be debuting the International CANNESERIES Festival from 4 – 11 April 2018, alongside MIPTV.  CANNESERIES will include a programme of screenings for the general public called CANNESERIES Addicts and, in partnership with MIPTV, a forum for early stage co-production projects called In Development. In Development will connect writers and producers with decision-makers, distributors and financing partners. The festival will also feature an international competition and a short-form competition, unsurprisingly called CANNESERIES Digital. The goal of the new festival is to showcase content from around the world.

Speaking Opportunity: National Principals Conference will be in Chicago from 11 – 13 bringing together school leaders from all grade levels for this annual national gathering.  The conference organizers are interested in presentation ideas that align with one of three focus strands: Leading learning, Building culture, and Designing the future. If you have a speaker/topic suggestion, fill out their online form found here, by 13 November.

Lunchtime Learning: Some of the most fascinating talks from The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos are available for your viewing pleasure. This collection of world leaders, business leaders and academics will require a much longer time period than your lunch break to digest.

Coming up next week: Security experts head to NYC for the O’Reilly Security Conference on 30 October. The program, which will feature the theme “Build Better Defenses,” offers a packed schedule of training, case studies, and keynotes, as well as awards honoring leadership in the security field. The 2017 CHIME Fall CIO Forum caters to a member-only audience of select CIOs and other senior healthcare IT executives on 31 October in San Antonio. New this year is Leadership from the Edge, a set of forward-thinking sessions formatted like TED talks prior to the closing keynote. More than 8,000 higher ed IT professionals meet at the Educause Annual Conference in Philadelphia to hear from peers who are driving innovation in teaching and learning. It runs 31 October – 3 November. The theme “Innovation in the Post-Advertising Era” awaits attendees at Ad:tech/New York, taking place 1-2 November. And the Forbes CMO Summit begins 1 November in Dana Point. An intimate gathering of 120 top marketing leaders across industries, executives at the CMO Summit network, hear from their peers, and learn new ways to address the challenges of today’s complex marketing landscape.