AltWeekly Awards judges don’t have it easy. Now in its 12th year, the awards have grown into 23 categories with two circulation divisions. Papers sent in their brightest entries: 1,481 of them. The Feature Story category had the most submissions in a single category, with 199 competing against each other.

To handle that number of entries, AAN recruited almost 170 distinguished journalists who spent nearly three months examining materials. The participating judges have a wide variety of professional experience. Many previously worked at alt-weeklies. Some are currently working at some of the largest mainstream newspapers in the country. Others work in printed and online magazines, blogs, new media companies, and journalism schools. Their collective resumes feature journalism’s highest honors, including fellowships, AltWeekly Awards, and a dozen or so Pulitzer Prizes.

The AltWeekly Awards are judged in two different ways. The writing/reporting categories (Arts Criticism, Investigative Reporting, News Story, etc.) are judged in two rounds. Teams of preliminary judges review all entries, and the six to eight highest scoring entries advance to the final round. Three judges independently review the finalists for both circulation divisions. The awards administrator calculates the scores and shares the ranks with the final judges. At that point, the judges are allowed to discuss and approve the final ranking.

Each design and web category (Editorial Layout, Illustration, Photography, Blog, etc.) is evaluated by three judges. They independently review and score entries. The six to eight highest scoring entries advance into a second round. Judges re-examine the materials, and enter a second set of scores. The awards administrator shares the ranks with judges, who are then allowed to discuss and approve the final ranking.

In the fall, AAN will release Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2007, which features the first-place winners’ work, judge commentary and the judges’ biographies. For more information, contact Heather Kuldell.

—

Howard Altman has won more than 50 journalism awards and is happy to return the love. Currently courts and cops team leader at The Tampa Tribune, he was an editor and columnist at the Philadelphia City Paper. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, American Journalism Review, Irish Independent, Salon.com, Wired.com, Penthouse and Philadelphia City Paper. When he’s not badgering writers or banging out stories, he can be found coaching his kids’ teams, or on a fishing pier, contributing frozen shrimp to the underwater economy.

Amy Argetsinger co-authors “The Reliable Source,” a gossip column for the Style section of The Washington Post. She previously covered education, local politics, crime and other beats for the Post as well as staffing its West Coast bureau for a year.

Gil Asakawa was music editor of Denver’s alternative newsweekly Westword from 1980-1991, and was also entertainment editor and art critic for the Colorado Springs Gazette from 1992-1996. Since then he has worked online and is currently director of content for Examiner.com. He has also written freelance articles for NY Rocker, Request, Creem, Pulse and Rolling Stone magazines, and has authored Being Japanese American (Stone Bridge Press 2004) and co-authored The Toy Book (Knopf, 1991).

Stephanie Banchero is an education reporter at the Chicago Tribune. In 2005, Banchero received a first-place award from the national Education Writers Association and the first-place writing award from the Missouri School of Journalism for her coverage of a 9-year-old affected by the No Child Left Behind Act. That same year, she also was on a team of reporters who won a second-place award from EWA for coverage of state education issues. Banchero joined the Tribune as a reporter in 1997, having previously served at such papers as The Charlotte Observer, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Salt Lake Tribune. She graduated from University of Utah with a B.A. in communications and received her M.A. from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She was born in Salt Lake City in 1963.

Dan Baum, who just got fired from The New Yorker magazine, is working on a book about New Orleans. He works with his wife, Margaret L. Knox. In addition to The New Yorker, they’ve written for Rolling Stone, Wired, Playboy and Monterey County Weekly.

Erin Behan, who resides in Brooklyn with her husband and two cats, spends most of her day making the Internet safe for consumption at Citysearch.com. She freelanced for both Topside Loaf and Creative Loafing while in Atlanta, where she started her Internet career. Despite her online time, she still has a soft spot for the printed word.

John Bicknell is the social policy editor for Congressional Quarterly. He has been a journalist for more than 20 years, the last seven-and-a-half in Washington at CQ.

Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, began blogging in 1999. She is now an internationally known speaker on the Internet’s impact on business, media and society. Her website is rebeccablood.net.

Nicole Bogdas is news projects designer at The Palm Beach Post and was previously lead news designer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She is on the board of directors for the Society for News Design, an organization that has recognized her work numerous times. Bogdas is a native of Chicagoland and credits the Chicago Reader with vastly improving her suburban upbringing.

Michael Booth is a movie critic and entertainment writer for The Denver Post. He has covered city hall, health care, the environment, wildfires and other subjects, and was a Sunday feature writer for five years. He has won the Best of the West award for column writing and the national Education Writers Award for feature writing. His book, The Denver Post Guide to Family Films, will appear in the fall.

Bill Brazell finds and evaluates high-quality blogs as director of author services at Federated Media (federatedmedia.net). He was a senior news editor at the Industry Standard magazine, then a senior editor at Portfolio, a business-book imprint at Penguin. Brazell was recently elected to the Board of Trustees of the PKD Foundation. He also wrote the male half of a humorous male-female dictionary called He Meant, She Meant (Warner Books). He majored in English at Harvard, got a master’s in journalism at U.C. Berkeley, and lives in Brooklyn.

John Breneman is an editor and columnist at the Boston Herald, and publisher of the satire website HumorGazette.com.

Clint Brewer is an executive editor of The City Paper, a free daily newspaper in Nashville, and president-elect of the national Society of Professional Journalists. Brewer is a native of Knoxville and a lifelong Tennessee resident. He began his career in the mid-1990s as a staff reporter for the 9,500-circulation daily The Lebanon Democrat, covering state and local politics as well as business and economic development. Brewer is a four-time winner of the Malcolm Law Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting from the Tennessee Associated Press Managing Editor’s conference and now teaches at a variety of journalism conferences. He lives in the Gladeville community of Wilson County, Tenn., with his wife, Amy, and his two children, Emma Grace, 5, and Davis Clinton, 3.

Stephen Burd is senior research fellow in the education policy program at the New America Foundation. In this capacity, he will help shape the foundation’s work on higher-education policy, particularly the nexus between postsecondary education and high-school policy issues, and on student financial-aid issues, including student loans. Mr. Burd was previously a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he focused on federal higher-education policy and the inner workings of student loan and financial aid policy. Over a decade and a half, his career at The Chronicle was marked by numerous notable news scoops, and by his success at driving national coverage of student-aid issues. Mr. Burd holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Swarthmore College.

Ada Calhoun is the editor-in-chief of the new urban parenting magazine Babble.com, and the consulting editor of sex-and-culture magazine Nerve.com. She has worked at New York magazine and Vogue, and written about books and theater for The New York Times. Her first professional writing job was at The Austin Chronicle.

Alicia Wagner Calzada is an independent photojournalist based in San Antonio, Texas. Alicia is a past president of the National Press Photographers Association and the chair of the NPPA Advocacy Committee. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she has worked on the staffs of Rumbo, Orlando Sentinel, and The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.). She currently shoots for a variety of editorial and corporate clients. Her website is aliciaphoto.com.

David Carr is a media columnist and general assignment culture reporter at The New York Times. He also writes a seasonal blog about the Oscars. Carr is a former editor of Washington City Paper and the Twin Cities Reader.

Ethan Casey is the author of the travel book Alive and Well in Pakistan and author or editor of several other books. He has been an international reporter for The Globe and Mail, Financial Times, The Boston Globe, South China Morning Post and other publications, and a pioneering online editor (Blue Ear, 1999-2005). He is currently co-host of PakCast: A Weekly Audio Dialogue Between Pakistan and the West (packast.com). He lives in Seattle.

Jane Catoe is a former columnist and section editor for Atlanta’s Creative Loafing newspaper. Since leaving Creative Loafing, Catoe has been a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother to her now 3-year-old daughter. Over the years, she has lived and written in Atlanta, Charleston, S.C., Albuquerque, N.M., Boston, Las Vegas, Richmond, Va., and Scottsdale. Catoe currently lives in South Carolina.

Marc Charisse is the editor of a community daily in Hanover, Penn. He has a Ph.D. in mass media law and history from the University of Washington and is a former reporter/media columnist for Folio Weekly in Jacksonville, Fla.

Tracy Collins is deputy managing editor at The Arizona Republic, in charge of visuals, the copy desk, sports and technology. He joined the paper as sports editor in 2000, and also has served as presentation editor, planning editor and convergence editor. He was graphics/design editor then assistant managing editor for news at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette before moving west. He has been a managing editor, city editor, presentation editor, features editor, sports editor, news editor, copy editor, reporter, music critic and video game reviewer at half a dozen newspapers, ranging in size from 16,000 to 620,000.

Joe Conason writes a weekly column for The New York Observer that is distributed by Creators Syndicate. He is also a columnist for Salon.com, and director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. His books, Big Lies (2003) and The Hunting of the President (2000), with Gene Lyons, were both national bestsellers. His latest book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, was released in February 2007.

Maureen Conners has been deputy editor of social policy at Congressional Quarterly in Washington since June 2004. She helps supervise and edits stories by six reporters on the team, which covers legislation in Congress dealing with education, labor, housing, legal affairs and heath care. She went to CQ from The Baltimore Sun, where she served for eight years in various positions that included assistant bureau chief in a suburban county. Conners was also a copy editor on the Sun’s metro, national and foreign desks. Before going to the Sun, she was a copy editor at the Orlando Sentinel for six years. Early in her career, she worked at two newspapers in West Virginia, including The Charleston Gazette, as a reporter, copy editor and news photographer.

Judson Cowan is originally from North Carolina and holds a B.F.A. in graphic design and a B.F.A. in traditional photography. He is currently living in Atlanta working as senior art director for the Morrison Agency and spending all his free time making electronic music. He enjoys root beer a great deal and video games even more so. There is speculation that he is incredibly wealthy and handsome but these rumors are largely unconfirmed.

Jerry Cullum is senior editor of Art Papers, an international magazine of contemporary art based in Atlanta. He also curates exhibitions from time to time and has reviewed art regularly for The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Anne-Marie Cusac, assistant professor in the department of communication at Roosevelt University, is a George Polk Award-winning journalist. For 10 years, she was an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine. Cusac won the George Polk Award for her article “Stunning Technology,” an investigation of the use of the stun belt in U.S. prisons. She has won the Project Censored Award three times-in 1997, for “Shock Value: U.S. Stun Devices Pose Human-Rights Risk,” in 1998, for “Nuclear Spoons: Hot Metal May Find its Way to Your Dinner Table,” and again in 2003 for “Brazen Bosses.” She has also been recognized with a second-place John Bartlow Martin Award, and a 2002 Milwaukee Press Club Award for magazine reporting. Cusac is also the author of two books of poetry, most recently Silkie, published by Many Mountains Moving Press in 2007.

Bill Daley is food and wine critic at the Chicago Tribune. He writes a weekly wine column, “Uncorked,” for the Tribune‘s “Good Eating” food section. He also answers questions from readers in a Sunday Q&A column called “Daley Drink.” It runs in the newspaper’s Q section. In tackling the food and wine beat, Daley covers chefs and food personalities, cooking techniques and trends. He tapes a weekly spot on food and wine for WBBM-AM, the CBS all-news radio station in town. He is featured in a weekly video segment posted on the Tribune‘s website. Daley spent 13 years at The Hartford Courant, most recently as restaurant reviewer, as well as a food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has been recognized twice for restaurant criticism by the Association of Food Journalists and served as that organization’s president from 2002-2004.

Steve Davolt has survived 15 years as an editor and writer in the Grub Street sweatshops of Washington, D.C., which makes him living proof that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. While he has been associated with such consumer and trade publications as American Gardener, Destination Discovery and Washington Business Journal, his heart has always belonged to alternative newspapers.

Anthony DeCurtis is the author, most recently, of In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Hal Leonard), and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Jim DeRogatis is the pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and the co-host of “Sound Opinions,” the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show, which is syndicated on Public Radio via American Public Media. He has written for many other publications, including several alternative weeklies when they were actually still alternative, and is the author of five books, including Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic and Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips.

Kelly DiNardo is a freelance writer who keeps waiting to be told to get a real job. Until then, she’ll drink cocktails, go racecar driving, sweat through a Bikram yoga class and learn the secrets of an Elvis impersonator – all in the name of work. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Redbook, The Washington Post and USA Today. Her biography on burlesque legend Lili St. Cyr will be published in September.

Kevin Drum is a contributing writer for The Washington Monthly and has authored its blog, Political Animal, since March 2004. Prior to that he wrote Calpundit, an independent liberal political blog. During the ’90s, he was vice president of marketing for a software company in Irvine, Calif. He lives with his wife and two cats in Irvine.

Mary Ellen Egan is an associate editor and chief of reporters at Forbes magazine. In addition to supervising the reporter pool, she also writes on a variety of topics including health care, the intersection of law and science, and new developments in biotechnology. Prior to joining Forbes in 2001, Mary Ellen was an investigative reporter for City Pages in Minneapolis. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Kevin Fagan is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, currently on sabbatical for a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University during the 2006-07 academic year. Since 2003, he has been the only reporter nationwide covering homelessness as a beat. Fagan has won more than 65 regional and national awards, most recently including the 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism; the 2005 Heywood Broun Award of Substantial Distinction; third place in the 2005 National Headliner Awards and the National Excellence in Urban Journalism Award from the Enterprise Foundation and the Freedom Forum for “Shame of the City,” a five-part series on homelessness in San Francisco. Fagan graduated with a B.A. in journalism from San Jose State University, and has worked for United Press International, Lodi News-Sentinel and Oakland Tribune.

Paul Fain is a staff reporter for The Chronicle of Higher of Education. He writes about money and management issues in higher education, reporting on college presidents, governing boards and on the surprisingly related beat of tax policy. Prior to joining The Chronicle, Fain was a staff writer for C-Ville Weekly, an alternative newsweekly in Charlottesville, Va., where he wrote about business, crime and politics. Fain has also written for Washington City Paper, City Limits and Mother Jones.

Mark Feeney is an arts writer for The Boston Globe. He has also written for the New Republic, New York Observer, Los Angeles Times, Washington Monthly, and other publications. A past vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief (University of Chicago Press) and has taught at Brandeis and Princeton Universities.

Mark Fitzgerald is editor-at-large of Editor & Publisher magazine, the principal publication for the newspaper industry. He covers all aspects of newspapers from journalism and ethical issues to production and finance. He is a five-time winner of the Neal Award, sometimes referred to as the Pulitzer Prize of business journalism. Mark Fitzgerald lives with his wife, Lyn, and sons, Kieran and Desmond, in the 41st Ward on the northwest side of Chicago.

Ben Fritz is technology reporter and video games editor for Variety / Daily Variety. He co-wrote The New York Times best-seller All the President’s Spin and co-founded the political rhetoric watchdog site Spinsanity.org. He also edits the satirical website DatelineHollywood.com.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason, the libertarian monthly that has been named one of “The 50 Best Magazines” by the Chicago Tribune three out of the past four years. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Slate.com, Salon.com, Time.com, National Public Radio’s “Marketplace,” and many other places. In 2004, he edited Choice: The Best of Reason, an anthology of the magazine’s best articles from the past decade and in 1996, he received his Ph.D. in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The father of two sons, Gillespie lives in Washington, D.C., and Oxford, Ohio.

Robin Givhan received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Princeton University and a Masters of Science in journalism from the University of Michigan. Since 1995 she has been the fashion editor of The Washington Post where she covers the news, trends and business of the international fashion industry. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, American Vogue, Marie Claire and Essence. She has contributed to several books including Runway Madness and No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers. In 2006, she won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her fashion coverage. She lives and works in New York City.

Stephanie Glaros is art director of Utne Reader magazine, which reprints the best articles from over 2,000 alternative media sources. Previously, she worked as an independent art director and graphic designer for a variety of clients. She has a B.A. in women’s studies from the University of Montana, and an A.A.S. degree in graphic design from Minneapolis Community and Technical College. She enjoys cooking, photography, travel and reading. She proudly claims zero MySpace friends.

Joshua Glazer‘s journalism career began when the start-up he was selling ads for – Real Detroit Weekly – asked him to review a techno CD for its first issue. A week later he was interviewing international stars Underworld and was hooked. Today, he is the editor and content director of Los Angeles-based URB magazine and URB.com. He has also freelanced for All Music Guide and iTunes.

Michael Goldberg, currently editor in chief of MOG.com, is a distinguished pioneer in the online music space; Newsweek magazine called him an “Internet visionary.” In 1994, Goldberg founded the highly influential Addicted To Noise (ATN), the first music-oriented website with original content. He was a senior vice president and editor-in-chief at SonicNet from March 1997 through May 2000. Goldberg both initiated and oversaw the yearlong investigation that resulted in SonicNet’s series “Playing With Fire: The Untold Story of Woodstock 99” which was awarded a Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for web reporting in 2001. From 1984 through 1993, Goldberg was a senior writer and associate editor at Rolling Stone. Prior to that, he freelanced for Esquire, Downbeat, In These Times, New Musical Express, San Francisco Chronicle, the Berkeley Barb, New Times, California magazine, NY Rocker and numerous other publications.

Carol Goodhue is the readers’ representative and training editor for The San Diego Union-Tribune. She has happily left behind her contest-entry-preparation duties after assisting with entries that won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for work by the paper and Copley News Service in uncovering bribes taken by former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. She has held various editing positions in news and features at the Union-Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and The Argus in Fremont, Calif. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Terry Greene Sterling was a staff writer at Phoenix New Times for 13 years and is now a contributing editor for Phoenix Magazine and a contributor for The Washington Post. Her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines through the years. Sterling is a three-time winner of Arizona’s highest journalism honor-The Virg Hill Journalist of the Year Award. She teaches magazine writing at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

Kevin Griffis is a former staff writer for Creative Loafing‘s Atlanta newspaper. In 2002, he won the first-place AAN award in the News Story category for a piece that uncovered tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to then-Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell’s re-election campaign. Most recently, Griffis directed communications for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona, and in 2005, was part of Tim Kaine’s successful gubernatorial bid in Virginia.

Matthew Guemple, who primarily chose his career in graphic design as an excuse to wear “cool clothes,” is currently working as the interim art director at Rolling Stone. He remains hopeful to enjoy the kindness of strangers with exotic work in exciting locales and that someday he will again bask in a well-appointed office with functional voicemail. In his spare time he enjoys the color orange, calling people with Presidents’ names “Pet,” really good “bad” photography and swearing to the oldies.

Sandra Haggerty has been a journalism educator for the past 34 years. The E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University has been her academic home for 28 of those years. Haggerty’s column-writing experience includes stints at the Oakland Tribune and Los Angeles Times. For several years, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate distributed her weekly column to newspapers across the country. Her research interests include “Youth Gang and Drug Intervention Strategies,” “Using News to Reach and Teach At-Risk Youth” and “Journalism in South Africa.”

Tom Hallman Jr., 51, was born and raised in Portland, Ore. His first job was in New York City as copy editor for Hearst Magazines Special Publications. He has worked as a reporter at The Hermiston Herald in Oregon and the Tri-City Herald in Washington before moving to The Oregonian in 1980. He’s received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize, American Society Newspaper Editors awards, National Scripps Howard Journalism Awards, National Headliner Awards and more. He has written for Readers Digest and Best Life Magazine. His book, Sam: The Boy Behind the Mask, was published in 2002.

Ruth Hammond is a senior copy editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Previously, she worked as editorial director at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and helped establish and edited the collaborative news site, AltWeeklies.com. She also ran the AltWeekly Awards contest and was co-editor of Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2005, the first in a series, and editor of the “How I Got That Story” series on the association’s website. She was a writer and investigative reporter for a number of weekly and daily newspapers, including Pittsburgh City Paper and In Pittsburgh Newsweekly, and specialized in covering issues of poverty and the Hmong refugee community.

Ray Hanania is a freelance writer and syndicated columnist with newspapers throughout the United States and the Middle East. A journalist since 1976, his main assignment included covering Chicago City Hall fulltime from 1976 through 1992. He is a two-time winner of the Chicago Headline Club (SPJ) Lisagor Award for column writing and won the 2006/2007 Best Ethnic American Columnist Award from New America Media.

Glenn Harper is editor of Sculpture magazine, and was previously the editor of Art Papers, an alternative arts publication based in Atlanta. He has published articles and reviews in numerous publications, including ArtForum, Public Art Review and Aperture, and is the editor of the anthologies A Sculpture Reader and Interventions and Provocations.

Alex Heard is the editorial director at Outside magazine. He also has worked as an editor at Wired and The New York Times Magazine and written for various publications, including Slate.com and The New Republic. Heard is the author of 1999’s Apocalypse Pretty Soon, a nonfiction look at millennial subcultures, and is currently writing a new one on the 1951 execution of Willie McGee, an African-American man accused of raping a white housewife in Laurel, Miss.

Mary Huhn is a features writer for the New York Post, where she focuses mostly on music. She has also worked for Adweek and Mediaweek magazines as well as Rolling Stone online. Her first first and only alt-weekly piece was printed in The Village Voice in the late ’80s and cited by Spy magazine as an example of terrible writing in the Voice. She’s been working in journalism since she moved to New York City in 1985 from the Philadelphia suburbs.

April Hunt is the social-services reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. Most of her career has been as a government and political reporter, most recently covering Florida’s 2006 U.S. Senate race. She has worked in Florida, New York, Ohio and Puerto Rico. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in public administration.

Rebecca Smith Hurd, a San Francisco-based word nerd, has worked as a journalist for two decades. Most recently, as assistant managing editor of Wired, Rebecca honed the voice of the magazine – shaping stories, smoothing language, and writing headlines. During her tenure, Wired was nominated three times and in 2005 won the National Magazine Award for general excellence. Rebecca holds a bachelor’s in journalism from San Jose State University and started her career at age 16 as a music critic for Metro, Silicon Valley’s alternative weekly. Since then, she’s served as a columnist, copy editor, special issues editor, bureau chief, or managing editor at several U.S.-based magazines, newspapers, and news services. She left Wired in March of 2006 to pursue several freelance projects, including writing a cookbook.

Todd Inoue – a Sanjaya Malakar fan – broke into the journalism game in 1992 with AAN weekly Metro Silicon Valley where he worked as an intern, music and arts writer, calendar editor and, from 2002-2006, music editor. He currently toils with the iTunes staff in Cupertino, Calif., keeping a cramped toe in the writing game (most recently for The Washington Post, Vibe, Hyphen and XXL). He also maintains a soporific blog about South Bay minutiae at youmightbefromsanjose.blogspot.com.

Neil Irwin is a reporter for the Business section of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 2000. He writes about the U.S. economy, with particular focus on how macroeconomic trends affect a broad swath of Americans. During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in New York.

Angie Jabine edited the AAN newsletter from 1987 to 1994. She has written for Willamette Week, The Oregonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Advertising Age, Audubon and other publications. In 1998, after three years as editor of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s member magazine, she became the editor of Northwest Palate, the magazine of food, wine, and travel in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing appears in Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature (Watershed Media, 2006).

David Jackson has been a reporter for the Chicago Tribune since 1991, except for a year at The Washington Post, where he and three other reporters won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service. At the Tribune, he has been a Pulitzer finalist for investigative and national reporting. He began his career writing for the Chicago Reader, Haymarket and other alternative papers.

Josh Jackson is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the 2006 & 2007 Plug Awards Magazine of the Year, Paste, which Jason Lee calls “so deliciously sweet, I often put it my waffles in the morning instead of syrup.” He’s been named one of Relevant magazine’s 12 Revolutionaries and one of Georgia Trends‘ “40 Under 40.” He’s also served as a regular music and film critic for CNN Headline News and Atlanta radio station Dave-FM and serves on the alumni board for The Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, where he graduated with a special focus on magazines. He’s interviewed dozens of musicians and entertainers for the magazine, and his profile of actor/director Zach Braff was the October 2006 cover. Prior to launching Paste, Jackson served as communications director for the Luke Society and freelance writer and photographer, covering assignments on six continents.

Art Janik worked at the New York Press in 2003, writing art, theater and restaurant reviews, among other things. He recently co-organized an alternative journalism panel featuring Robert Cox (president, Media Bloggers Association); Amy Goodman (host, “Democracy Now!”); Richard Karpel (executive director, AAN); Jeff Koyen (former editor, New York Press); and Elizabeth Spiers (founder, Gawker.com). He is currently a grant writer for New York City Center, a landmark non-profit performing arts center in midtown Manhattan.

Mary Jordan is The Washington Post‘s co-bureau chief in London. She graduated from Georgetown University in 1983 and also spent a year studying Irish poetry at Trinity College in Dublin. She received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1984 and joined the Post that year. She was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1989-90. Jordan and her husband, Kevin Sullivan, were the Post‘s co-bureau chiefs in Tokyo from 1995 to 1999 and Mexico City from 2000 to 2005. They won the George Polk Award in 1998 for coverage of the Asian Financial Crisis and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their coverage of the Mexican criminal justice system. They are the authors of The Prison Angel, a biography that won a 2006 Christopher Award. They have two children.

Heather Joslyn is a features editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Before that she oversaw the Arts section of Baltimore City Paper for several years. In her spare time, she also served as the alternative weekly’s managing editor. She lives in Baltimore, where she reads, watches movies, and plays the devil’s music.

Cynthia Joyce is a freelance writer, editor, and web producer who has written for several local and national publications including Creative Loafing, Gambit Weekly, Newsday, The Washington Post and Legal Affairs, among others, and still contributes regularly to Salon.com, where she was a founding A&E editor. In 2000, she completed a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University. Currently a resident of New Orleans, she maintains a blog about post-Katrina life in Louisiana called CultureGulf (artsjournal.com/culturegulf).

Madeleine Begun Kane is a New York City-based humor columnist, recovering lawyer and musician whose columns, political song parodies and satirical poems have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, websites and anthologies. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists honored her work as a humor columnist in 1996. Her personal humor site, madkane.com, has garnered awards from USA Today, Shift Magazine, Maxim and About.com’s 2005 Political Dot-Comedy Award for Best Parody.

Mollie Katzen is listed by The New York Times as on the best-selling cookbook authors of all time with over 6 million books in print. A 2007 inductee into the prestigious James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, Katzen has been named by Health magazine as one of “The Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat.” Largely credited with moving healthful vegetarian food from the “fringe” to the center of the American dinner plate, Katzen is best known as the creator of the groundbreaking classics, Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. She writes a national food column syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, works as a contributing editor for SHAPE magazine and runs Mollie Katzen Designs (molliekatzendesigns.com). In fall 2007, on the 30th anniversary of Moosewood Cookbook, Katzen will publish her tenth book, The Vegetables I Can’t Live Without (Hyperion).

Meghan Keane is a 2006 Phillips Fellow writing a book on scandal in popular culture and a film critic for The New York Sun.

Bryan Keefer is co-author of The New York Times bestseller All the President’s Spin. He was founding assistant managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s CampaignDesk.org, devoted to improving media coverage of politics, and co-founder and editor of Spinsanity.org, which was a non-partisan site devoted to debunking political spin. A freelance writer and Internet consultant, his work has appeared in publications including Salon.com and The Washington Post.

John Kessler is a food writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He got his start at an alternative weekly – Denver’s Westword – and went on to review restaurants for The Denver Post before moving to Atlanta as chief critic. A couple of years ago he realized he wanted to cook more and eat out less, so he went from reviewing restaurants to writing a food column and general assignment features. Over the years he has lost many writing contests, including one where the judge’s sole comment was “Prolix!” Of the many unnecessary words he shoehorns into his copy, this was not one of them, and so he was forced to consult a dictionary. He thinks much of the best food writing in America comes from the alternative press, whether it wins awards or not.

Paul Kiel is deputy editor of TalkingPointsMemo.com and a reporter/blogger for the investigative blog TPMmuckraker.com.

Erin Kissane edits AListApart.com, an online magazine for people who make websites. She also serves as editorial director of A List Apart’s publisher, Happy Cog Studios. Erin lives in Portland, Ore., with two cats and an animator.

Ken Krayeske, a freelance journalist, is enrolled in his first year of law school at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University. He holds a B.S. in magazine journalism from Syracuse University (’94). His stories and photos – from the United States, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, have run in many publications, including Poynter.org, Adbusters and High Times. A former Hartford Advocate writer, he later started a newspaper for Hartford students. Read his weekly column atthe40yearplan.com.

Kiran Krishnamurthy has been a reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch since 1999. He recently wrote about a Catholic priest who neighbors say was married and who police say allegedly embezzled up to $1 million. He covered the 2006 marquee election contest between then-Sen. George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb, which tipped control of Congress to Democrats, and was a major contributor to the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings. He has won several awards and has contributed stories to Financial Times and Reuters.

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of three books, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and public radio’s “This American Life.” A former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, Kotlowitz began his journalism career at The Lansing Star, an alternative weekly in Lansing, Mich. His honors include the George Foster Peabody Award, the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He’s a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University.

Jeff Koyen is a travel writer whose work appears in The New York Times, Penthouse, Men’s Journal, Wired.com and others. In 1995, he joined New York Press as a contributing writer; in 2002, he was hired as the associate editor of The Prague Pill. When New York Press was sold in 2003, Koyen was hired as the new editor-in-chief. He was forced to resign in 2005 after publishing a nasty article about the then-dying Pope.

Richard Leiby is a writer and editor at The Washington Post. He has covered both the Oscars and the Iraq War for the Style section. He collected his first check as a journalist ($15) from the weekly Harrisburg Independent Press (HIP) when he was 17. He then spent the next 33 years hoping to make better money while also trying to make newspaper stories less boring. He has yet to claim total success at either goal.

Thomas Leitch is professor of English and director of film studies at the University of Delaware and senior editor at Kirkus Reviews. His most recent books are Perry Mason and Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ.

Tim Leong is the deputy art director at Complex Magazine. He was previously the associate art director at Men’s Health.

Josh Levin is an associate editor at Slate.com, where he edits the magazine’s sports and technology sections. Before coming to Slate, he was an editorial intern at Washington City Paper. Levin, a native of New Orleans, now lives in Washington, D.C.

Dan Levine is a news editor at The Recorder, a legal daily in San Francisco. He previously worked as a full time reporter at the Hartford Advocate until 2003. He then founded an online news service in Connecticut called ctnewsjunkie.com and freelanced for numerous media outlets, including In These Times and The Nation. He got his start in journalism as a Village Voice intern.

Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Vibe, Spin and Tracks magazines, and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, he is the author of The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys.

Stephanie Grace Lim is a photo-illustrating design machine fueled by high-octane pigtails. Formerly the features design director at the San Jose Mercury News, she is now the principle creative designer at eBay’s PayPal division. She has been nationally recognized by Nikon, Society of News Design, National Press Photographers Association, Associated Press, National Headliners, and has won the Michigan College Photographer of the Year and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Aaron Lovell writes about high finance and real estate in New York City. He was a formerly a freelance writer and intern at the New York Press, where he wrote about music, food and culture. His writing has also appeared in Maximum RocknRoll, People, The Patriot-Ledger and the Chicago Daily Herald. This February, he co-organized a panel on the future of alternative journalism for the Medill Club of Greater New York.

Ralph Lucci is co-founder and creative director for Behavior, a premiere creative boutique shop in New York City. Previously he was creative director at i/o360 Digital Design and head of user-experience design at Rare Medium. His affinity for intense information design challenges fuels his passion for intuitive interfaces through innovative user-experiences. He has forged relationships with such diverse clients as AARP, MoMA, HBO, P-Diddy, XM Satellite Radio, Microsoft, Sony, Time Warner and The New York Times. An active alumnus of The Cooper Union, he’s spoken for the AIGA and as a guest critic at Yale University. His recent work has been showcased in Communication Arts, ID Magazine, FORM and Blueprint.

Mike Luckovich became the editorial cartoonist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989. Since then, he’s collected many awards, including a few from National Headliner and Overseas Press Club, the National Cartoonists Society’s Rueben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, plus a couple of Pulitzer Prizes. His work is syndicated in 150 newspapers and his most recent book is Four More Wars!.

Courtney Macavinta has been in online media for more than 12 years and her articles have been published by CNET, News.com, The Washington Post, Wired News, Business 2.0, The Associated Press and other publications. She’s co-author of the best-selling book for teens, RESPECT: A Girl’s Guide to Getting Respect and Dealing When Your Line Is Crossed, publishes a blog, RespectRx.com, and is the former editorial director of ChickClick.com. As an expert on girls’ and women’s issues, she’s been featured on CNN, Fox, National Public Radio, and in USA Today, CosmoGIRL!, Teen People, Teen Vogue, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News and others. She lives in San Jose, Calif.

Brady McCombs has been the Arizona Daily Star‘s border and immigration reporter since February 2006. He co-wrote the award-winning four-part investigative series “Illegal Labor Fix Falls Short” and “Securing our Border: Why it Won’t Work.” He is fluent in Spanish and lived three years in Costa Rica.

Duff McDonald is a contributing editor to Conde Nast Portfolio magazine. He writes for a variety of other publications as well, including Vanity Fair, New York magazine, and Wired. A Canadian, he lives in Bronxville, N.Y., with his wife, Caroline and their beagle, Sally.

Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect, is the author of an upcoming book, Monstering: Inside America’s Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Carroll & Graf, June). She is also a research fellow at New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.

John Mecklin is the editor of High Country News, a Colorado-based news magazine that covers the environment, politics and culture of the western U.S. In earlier lives, he was editor of two alt-weeklies, SF Weekly and Phoenix New Times, and an investigative reporter at the Houston Post, a 400,000-circulation daily, for which he also covered the Persian Gulf War from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Jennifer Mendelsohn is a seasoned feature writer specializing in entertainment. Mendelsohn was a longtime D.C.-based special correspondent for People and a humor columnist for Slate.com; her work has also appeared in numerous national publications including USA Today, USA Weekend, Country Music, The Washington Post, Worth and Family Circle. A sought-after ghostwriter for celebrity books, Mendelsohn has also taught magazine journalism at Baltimore’s Villa Julie College.

Jack Nelson, a newsman for more than 50 years, retired in 2003 after 38 years with the Los Angeles Times, including 22 years as Washington bureau chief. He began his career on the Biloxi Daily Herald in 1947, then served 12 years as an investigative reporter for The Atlanta Constitution where he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing wrongdoing at Milledgeville (Ga.) State Hospital, then the world’s largest mental hospital. He studied at Harvard under a Nieman Fellowship in 1961-62 and again in 2003 under a Shorenstein Fellowship. He’s the author of Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews, and is co-author of three books, including The Orangeburg Massacre and The FBI and the Berrigans: The Making of a Conspiracy. He lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife, Barbara Matusow, also a retired journalist.

Phil Nesbitt has been involved with print media for 39 years and has consulted with, restructured and redesigned more than 40 newspapers and magazines around the world. He began working at weekly unit tabloid newspapers and from 1976 to 1981, he was chief of the U.S. Army’s newspaper program. Nesbitt also has worked at The Record (N.J.), Singapore Monitor, Singapore News Publications, Ltd., Chicago Sun-Times and the American Press Institute. He also served as past president of the Society for News Design, led design discussions for API and Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and taught at Loyola University in Chicago. He currently works as a consultant for media and publishing organizations.

Andrew Adam Newman is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His work has appeared in New York magazine, Salon.com and on National Public Radio’s “Studio 360” with Kurt Andersen. He served as editor of Pittsburgh City Paper, In Pittsburgh Newsweekly and Boise Weekly, and as news editor of Casco Bay Weekly. He won a national AltWeekly Award in the Arts Feature category in 2003. He served on the board of AAN for five years, which is about how long each meeting seemed to last. He lives in New York. Visit him at andrewadamnewman.com.

Chris Nolan is the founder of Spot-on.com, a web-based syndication service that provides news outlets with independent, intelligent and insightful commentary and analysis on current events and social issues. The site, founded in 2003, is the current home of 11 writers. As Spot-on’s founder and editor, Nolan speaks and writes frequently on the impact of stand-alone journalism – a phrase she has coined to describe the work that experienced and professional writers are doing on the web – and how the networked news environment is changing journalism. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, Fortune, Business 2.0 and Conde Nast Traveler. Before moving to San Francisco 10 years ago to cover Silicon Valley, Nolan lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and covered Congress and the FCC. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.

James Norton is a freelance writer who blogs about food for Chow.com. He’s the founder of the arts, culture and politics magazine Flak (flakmag.com) and the author of Saving General Washington (2006, Tarcher). He lives in Minneapolis with his fiancée.

Chad Oliveiri is a reformed alternative journalist now steeped in instructional design. He worked for eight years as the features editor/managing editor of City Newspaper in Rochester, N.Y. During Chad’s time at City, the paper was a regular AltWeekly Award winner, particularly in the music-writing category.

Geneva Overholser holds the Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting in the Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington bureau. She is former editor of The Des Moines Register, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service under her direction. She has been ombudsman of The Washington Post, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, a syndicated columnist and a blogger for the Poynter Institute. She spent five years overseas, freelancing from Kinshasa and Paris.

Michael Parenti is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author, scholar and social commentator who has published some 275 articles (including an occasional contribution to alternative weeklies) and 20 books, including his most recent ones: The Culture Struggle (2006), Superpatriotism (2004), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003), and Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007). He lectures frequently in North America and abroad, and has appeared on many radio and television talk shows. For further information, visit michaelparenti.org.

Cheryl Phillips is a deputy investigations editor at The Seattle Times. She also worked as an investigative reporter at The Times from 2002 through 2006. The coverage on problems in security provided by the Transportation Security Administration won the national Society for Professional Journalists SDX award for investigative reporting in 2004. She was part of a reporting team on The Seattle Times‘ “Your Courts, Their Secrets” series, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in investigative reporting this year. She also was part of a team that reported on the Washington, D.C., sniper suspects in 2002. That coverage was a Pulitzer finalist in the breaking news category. Previously, she has worked as computer-assisted reporting editor for USA Today‘s sports section, as a CAR projects editor at The Detroit News, worked at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana and at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas. In Texas, she covered stadium issues of the Texas Rangers baseball team and wrote about then-team owner George W. Bush. She also is vice president of the board of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Ryan Pitts is online director for The Spokesman-Review, guiding the development of spokesmanreview.com, spokane7.com and other niche websites. He’s been working online since 2001, helping the Spokane, Wash., newspaper find new ways to do journalism and connect with readers.

Dale Pollock served eight years as the dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he is now a professor in Cinema Studies and Aesthetics. He is president of Peak Productions and Green Street Productions, and has produced 13 features films, four of which were nominated for Academy Awards. A writer at heart, Pollock began his career as the entertainment editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and later worked at Daily Variety and the Los Angeles Times. He has published pieces in magazines such as Esquire, GQ, People and Rolling Stone. In 1984, he published Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, currently in its third edition and fourth printing. He is currently at work on a historical novel and an academic film book.

James Poniewozik is the television and media critic for Time magazine and writes the “Culture Complex” column about pop culture and society, as well as the blog Tuned In for time.com. Before he moved to Time, he was the media columnist for Salon.com. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, Rolling Stone and other magazines; on National Public Radio; and in the comments sections of finer blogs everywhere. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and lives in Brooklyn.

Cory Powell is assistant managing editor for design and readership at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He was one of the architects of the Star Tribune’s 2005 redesign and has also led redesigns at the Charlotte Observer and Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer. In nearly two decades in newspapers, he has been a designer, copy editor, copy desk chief and news editor. He lives in Eagan, Minn., with his wife, Kristen, and two children, Cole and Carson.

Bruce Ramsay is Newsweek‘s director of covers and the Society of Publication Designers’ president. He has art directed Spin, Lear’s and Saturday Night magazines. His career includes the design of a newsweekly for Murdoch Magazine Development and AAD at Esquire. He designed The Art of Fashion Photography for Aperture, Naomi Campbell’s book, Naomi, and Hardcore Rap for Universe/Rizzoli. He teaches courses on magazine design and porfolio presentation at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Eric Reynolds is an editor for Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books and a cartoonist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Stranger, Mojo, The Ganzfeld and elsewhere. For Fantagraphics, he has edited books by Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, Johnny Ryan, Joe Coleman, Michael Kupperman and Gene Deitch. He is also the editor of the quarterly lit anthology Mome. As a cartoon character, he has cameo’d in “The Simpsons” television show as well as comic books ranging from Hate and Eightball to Aliens (where he was gruesomely eviscerated).

Sara Roahen‘s work has appeared in several publications, including Tin House, Oxford American and Food & Wine magazines. Her book, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place At The New Orleans Table, will be published by WW Norton next winter. She and her husband own a home in New Orleans. They pay rent in Philadelphia.

Dennis Roddy is a reporter and – until he took a year-long hiatus to let his knowledge base catch up with his opinion base – a columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He began working for newspapers in 1974 to help pay his college tuition. Upon graduating, he took an aptitude test, hoping to become a literature professor, and discovered he was ideally suited to journalism. In the course of 33 years, he has won the usual assortment of awards in a profession that has more awards than a state fair. He has been married twice, but only after the first one ended in divorce, thus keeping him off “Anderson Cooper 360.” He is the father of four children and is married to Joyce Gannon, a business writer for the Post-Gazette who he somehow conned into marrying him. In the course of his career, he has received numerous offers to leave Pittsburgh, most of them from other residents of Pittsburgh. He prefers, however, to remain in a city where, to paraphrase Brendan Behan, “all my enemies are nearby, so it’s very cozy.”

Bruce Rodgers was editor of PitchWeekly from 1993 to 2000 in Kansas City, Mo. He currently is co-owner of Discovery Publications Inc. in Kansas City, which publishes Discover Mid-America, a monthly regional specialty newspaper (print/online) and eKC online, an alternative online publication (kcactive.com).

Bleys W. Rose is a general assignment reporter for The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.). Previously, he was a bureau chief at the Hartford Courant and a reporter for The Kansas City Star. He was a member of The Star staff that received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Hyatt Hotel skywalk collapse. He has covered political and immigration issues, reporting from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

Matthew Rose is a page-one editor for The Wall Street Journal, a job he started in spring 2004. He joined the Journal in 1995 and worked for its European edition in London before moving to New York as the paper’s publishing and media reporter in 1999. He is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy and Washington, D.C. He currently lives in Virginia.

Jandos Rothstein is an assistant professor of graphic design at George Mason University, and design director of Governing Magazine, a national publication about trends in local and state government. He recently finished editing his first book, Designing Magazines, due in November from Allworth Press. He has also written for Print Magazine, Voice: The AIGA Journal of Design, I.D. and other publications. Jandos misses the thrill of designing an alt-weekly, but on balance is happier seeing his family on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

Heath Row joined DoubleClick Inc. as research manager in September 2006 to study the impact of new technology on advertising – and vice versa. To date, he has authored several research reports, including “Touchpoints IV: How Digital Media Fit into Consumer Purchase Decisions,” and “Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth.” Between August 2005 and his move to DoubleClick, Heath worked as senior director of community development for Squidoo, a content-sharing platform founded by Seth Godin. Previously, he served as an editor and writer for Fast Company magazine for roughly eight years. At Fast Company, he founded the Company of Friends, the magazine’s global readers’ network, and FC Now, the Fast Company team blog. While at Fast Company, he subscribed to most of the major alt-weeklies; he’s particularly fond of The Austin Chronicle.

Mike Sager started his career in journalism as an intern at Creative Loafing in Atlanta. Currently, he is a writer-at-large for Esquire. A collection of his articles, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n Roll and Murder, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. His second collection, Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality, will be published by Thunder’s Mouth in September 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in winter 2008.

Jason Salzman is a media critic for the Rocky Mountain News and the author of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits. With Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, he wrote 50 Ways YOU Can Show George the Door in 2004. His articles have been published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, Sierra, Westword, and others. He runs Cause Communications, which offers media assistance to nonprofit and activist groups.

Dave Scantland is an Atlanta-based writer and designer with 25 years’ experience in marketing, communications and identity, but his journalistic experience dates back to high school in 1971, when he established a bi-weekly alternative to the student council-sponsored paper. A former musician, cook and printer, he has worked for a number of global high-tech firms, as well as for the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, where he currently serves as director of operations.

Norborne Schaum graduated from Auburn University 25 years ago (yikes!) with a B.F.A. in design. He’s produced print, OOH and TV in Atlanta primarily, as a full-time and freelance A.D. on accounts like Quikrete Concrete, Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, The United Way, Georgia Pacific, Longhorn Steaks, on and on and others. He has had his butt planted at Fitzgerald and Co. as an A.C.D. working on Coca-Cola. He’s won some awards along the way, and tried to have some fun along the way too.

Michael Scherer is the Washington correspondent for Salon.com. Previously, he had been the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, an assistant editor at Columbia Journalism Review, an editorial fellow at Mother Jones, and an education reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, Mass.).

David Schimke is the editor-in-chief of Utne Reader, a digest of independent ideas and alternative journalism. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he spent three years writing at the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader before spending the next eight working for City Pages in Minneapolis as both an editor and writer. His political reporting, media analysis, arts criticism and feature writing was honored on three occasions by the AAN and garnered a half-dozen Page One Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Bruce Schimmel is the founding publisher of Philadelphia City Paper. As editor emeritus, he currently writes the column “Loose Canon,” which in 2006 won second place statewide in the Keystone Press Awards and placed third in the Society of Professional Journalists, Keystone State Professional Chapter. Schimmel has produced regular cultural and enterprise radio pieces for WSCL-FM (National Public Radio affiliate, Salisbury, Md.). In 2003, he started Sonic Squad, a radio-reporting project for children in rapidly developing rural Delaware. Schimmel is currently producing an audio history project called “Show and Tell” for the Milton (Del.) Historical Society. His radio productions have been broadcast nationally on the Pacifica radio network, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Living on Earth,” “Justice Talking,” and on “Pulse of the Planet.” Since 1999, Schimmel has received more than a dozen Associated Press regional awards in nearly every radio category.

Phil Semas has been editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. since 2002. He oversees all editorial and business operations of the company, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, their websites, and the website Arts & Letters Daily. Before becoming editor-in-chief, he served for seven years as editor of new media for The Chronicle. He oversaw all online activities by both newspapers, including their websites and e-mail newsletters. The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website has won numerous awards. The Chronicle and its website have also been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards. Semas is the founding editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which began publication in 1988. He edited the newspaper for its first seven years. He began his career at The Chronicle as a reporter in 1969 and served as managing editor from 1978 to 1988.

Craig Seymour lives in Providence, R.I., and is a writer, photographer and an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author of the biography Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross and a forthcoming memoir on Atria Books. He has also written numerous articles for The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, The Village Voice and other publications.

Geoff Shandler is vice president and editor-in-chief of Little, Brown. He has worked with, among others, Sir Harold Evans, William Greider, Robert Wright, Susan Orlean, William Least Heat-Moon, Jeff Gerth, Don Van Natta Jr., Christopher Drew and Tom Shales. He has written for The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The New York Times Magazine and others. He lives just outside of New York City.

Choire Sicha is the managing editor of Gawker.com, and a former senior editor at The New York Observer. He has also written often for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times on arts and culture folks.

Sam Sifton is the culture editor of The New York Times, where he has worked since 2001. He was formerly a writer and editor for New York Press. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Tina Fallon, and their two daughters.

Julia Simon is a writer and Internet nerd who has worked on the websites of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and, most recently, Spin, where she served as the assistant online editor. Her work has appeared on SPIN.com, on various music-oriented eZines, and on Twixtmagazine.com, where she is a founding editor. Spin, SOMA and other publications have also set her words to ink in their pages.

Stephanie Simon has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times for 14 years, covering a variety of news and feature beats. For the past eight years, she has worked for the national staff, first as a regional correspondent based in St. Louis and now as a faith beat reporter based in Denver.

Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina. In 22 years in daily newspapers – at the Winston-Salem Journal, Raleigh News & Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution – he covered politics, wrote editorials, book criticism, feature stories and a general interest column. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Commentary and a James Beard Foundation Award. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and Fortune, among other publications.

Peter Smith is an associate editor at Nerve.com, and considers himself very lucky to have the job. He grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Brooklyn.

Gabriel Snyder is a senior writer at W magazine based in Los Angeles. Previously he has been a film reporter for Variety and a media columnist at The New York Observer.

Rachel Sobel is a doctor who is training to be an ophthalmologist at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in U.S. News and World Report, where she was formerly on staff, as well as the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio and The New England Journal of Medicine, among others.

Carolyn Ruff Spellman is senior editor at the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families, a nonprofit, nonpartisan program of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, which inspires and recognizes exemplary reporting on children and families. Carolyn edits the CJC Summary and works on content for the website. Before joining CJC in 2004, she worked as a journalist for 10 years. She has freelanced for People magazine; written numerous feature articles for The Washington Post and other publications; and oversaw a national literacy program.

David Sterritt is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and emeritus professor of theater and film at Long Island University. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for more than 35 years until he retired and moved to Baltimore in 2005. His most recent book is Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader. Many years ago he was editor of Boston After Dark, now known as the Boston Phoenix.

Joe Strupp is a senior editor at Editor & Publisher, where he covers general assignment stories on everything from foreign news to features, profiles, journalism issues and business. Before joining E&P in 1999, Strupp worked at several newspapers including the Daily Journal, The Argus, S.F. Independent and the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif. He has freelanced for Salon.com, Mediaweek, New Jersey Monthly, NJ Biz and Your Sunday Visitor.

Chris Suellentrop writes “The Opinionator” for The New York Times. He has written features for The New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, Radar, Legal Affairs and The Wilson Quarterly, and he has written reviews and op-eds for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Observer, among other publications. He spent five years as a staff writer and editor at Slate.com, lastly as the online magazine’s 2004 campaign correspondent. He lives in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain.

Julie Sullivan is an enterprise reporter at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore. She shared the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing flaws in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Her report on the families of children with autism, “This is How We Live,” won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism. Sullivan has also won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Best Newspaper Writing award, four first-place Blethen Awards, and dozens of other awards for enterprise, government and investigative reporting. She is the co-author of Expecting Miracles, On the Path of Hope From Infertility to Parenthood with Dr. Christo Zouves. She is married to Jim Springhetti, a designer at The Oregonian. They have two children, Joe and Rose.

Kylee Swenson is an editor at Remix magazine, an electronic, hip-hop and rock production and performance-based magazine. Swenson oversees artist coverage and assigns, edits and writes while trying to pick artists’ brains for studio tips. She was a former editor at URB, Guitar Player, Keyboard, MC2 and Sonicnet/MTV. In addition, she’s written for Rolling Stone, VIBE, Maxim, Wired, Blender and other publications. Swenson spends the rest of her time producing music in her Pro Tools-based studio and playing live with her band Loquat.

Silja J.A. Talvi is a multiple award-winning investigative journalist and essayist with credits in over 75 publications, including The Nation, AlterNet.org, Santa Fe Reporter, Salon.com and The Christian Science Monitor. She is a senior editor at In These Times magazine and is finishing a book about women in prison (Seal Press/Avalon/Perseus), to be published in fall 2007.

Cary Tennis was on the staff of the SF Weekly in its very early days, has been a music journalist and a freelancer, and is currently the advice columnist for Salon.com.

Michael Tisserand‘s first childhood writing was a comic titled “Detective Snorkel.” Failing to get recognition for his work, he turned his back on illustration and, 30 years later, became an AAN editor. As editor of Gambit Weekly in New Orleans for seven years, he increased the comics presence in the paper by frequently commissioning work by Harvey Pekar, Greg Peters, Bunny Matthews and others as cover stories and in cover story packages. Now a writer based in Evanston, Ill., Tisserand is author of the music book The Kingdom of Zydeco (Arcade Publishing) and the new Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and his Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember (Harcourt).

Lawrence Toppman has been the movie critic of The Charlotte Observer since 1987. Before that, he covered live theater, classical music and pop music for The Observer and the now-defunct Charlotte News. He has sung with the chorus of Opera Carolina for 24 seasons.

Phillip Torrone is senior editor of MAKE and runs the award-winning makezine.com blog. He is an author, artist and engineer based in New York City and has authored and contributed to numerous books on mobile devices, multimedia and hacks. He writes daily on the MAKE blog, which attracts millions of visitors each month. In his spare time he’s a contributing editor to Popular Science magazine and also runs a high-powered laser cutter business that voids warranties on consumer electronics.

Jason Treat is the art director for The Atlantic Monthly magazine and is based in Washington, D.C. While he would be hard-pressed to call The Atlantic “alternative,” he is a devoted reader of alt-weeklies.

Lars Trodson is currently a writer for Griffin Bodi & Krause, one of New England’s premier communications firms. He was a newspaper writer and editor for 20 years – most recently a movie critic for The Wire in Portsmouth, N.H. He is a published essayist, short-story writer, poet and produced playwright. His award-winning short film, The Listeners, is currently making the festival circuit.

Coury Turczyn helped create that esteemed bastion of alternative journalismness, Metro Pulse, of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1991. After editing the multi-AAN-award-winner for nine years, the resulting bare shell of a man decided to launch himself into the heady world of freelance writing and webzine creation. He spent several years writing numerous fluffy articles (which were consequently made even fluffier) for Time Inc. publications and launching PopCultMag.com (which he really should have made into a blog, like his pal had suggested before blogs were big, thus becoming a millionaire in the process. Oh well.). He later entered the corporate web-slinging worlds of CNET, Comcast, and finally, HGTV, where he has learned more about kitchen-remodeling trends than most humans should be permitted to know. He profusely apologizes to all the worthy competitors for whom he failed to write comments.

Audrey Van Buskirk loathes tattoos and all forms of body piercing, so after nearly 15 successful years editing at alternative weeklies in Portland, Ore., Santa Fe, N.M., and Seattle, she found no alternative but to leave that world for the unblemished skin of the twice weekly Portland Tribune where she edits the features, arts and entertainment, and environmental sections. If she meets her deadline, she will deliver a second child one week before the 2007 AAN conference begins.

Tracy Van Slyke is the publisher of the Chicago-based In These Times, a national, award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting. Van Slyke has dedicated her career as a journalist, communications professional and media producer to building an independent media infrastructure.

Jeremy Voas has served as editor-in-chief of Phoenix New Times and Detroit’s Metro Times. He currently is an investigator for the federal public defender in Arizona.

Rob Walker writes the weekly “Consumed” column for The New York Times Magazine, and is the proprietor of the consumer/marketing/culture website, murketing.com/journal. From 2000 to 2003, he wrote a column for Slate.com, and contributed to many other publications, from The New Republic to The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that he was an editor for The New York Times Magazine, Money and The American Lawyer. He is the author of Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press; 2005).

Margaret Walter joined the University of Missouri-Columbia faculty in August 2003 as an assistant professor/news editor at the Columbia Missourian. Previously she had been features editor at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. She is a graduate of Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., with Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts degrees in journalism. She has served as wire editor, news editor, business editor, assistant Sunday editor and Sunday editor at The Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph in Nashua, N.H.; city government, business and economic development reporter at The Anderson (Ind.) Bulletin; features reporter at The Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune; and stints as editor at two weekly newspapers. She is a former president of the New Hampshire Press Association and of the New England Associated Press News Executives Association. She is a member of the American Copy Editors Society.

Simon Warner is lecturer, journalist and broadcaster who has taught popular music at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom since 1994. A live rock reviewer for The Guardian between 1992 an 1995, he is now senior teaching fellow in the university’s School of Music. His publications include Rockspeak: The Language of Rock and Pop (1996), a chapter in Remembering Woodstock (2004) and, as editor, the collection Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Protest Poem (2005). He was a featured columnist for the online webzine PopMatters.com from 2001-2006 and is a regular commentator on rock topics for the BBC.

Gwynne Watkins is an associate editor of two online magazines: the pop-culture website Nerve.com and the irreverent parenting site Babble.com. She frequently writes for Nerve about film, current events and popular culture. She is also a playwright and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Steve Weinberg is a freelance magazine writer, nonfiction book author and part-time teacher at the University of Missouri Journalism School.

David Weir, editor-in-chief at Keep Media, has worked previously as a reporter and editor at Rolling Stone, California, Mother Jones, Business 2.0, SunDance, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 7×7 and Pacific News Service; and at the Center for Investigative Reporting, which he co-founded in 1977. He’s also been an executive at KQED, Wired Digital, Salon.com, and Excite@Home. He’s published hundreds of articles, three books, and taught journalism for over 20 years at U-C (Berkeley), Stanford and San Francisco State.

David Whelan is a staff writer at Forbes, based in New York. He writes about health care, technology and philanthropy. Recent stories have focused on NutriSystem, Marvell, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Soitec, Google, Synaptics, Yahoo and Electronic Arts. He also co-manages the Midas List, an annual ranking of the top venture capitalists and other tech dealmakers. Prior to joining Forbes, Whelan was a business writer for the Contra Costa Times, where he also covered the recall campaign that made Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. He has also been on staff at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, American Demographics and Inside.com. From 1999 through 2000, he was an analyst with First Manhattan Consulting Group, working with banks on mergers, risk management and retail strategy. Whelan earned an A.B. in economics, with honors, from Harvard University (1999).

Donald R. Winslow has worked for three decades as a photojournalist, picture editor and writer. Today he is the editor of News Photographer magazine, the monthly publication of the National Press Photographers Association (nppa.org). He’s been a senior photographer for Reuters in Washington, D.C., covering the White House, Capitol Hill and major league sports during the George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton presidencies, and was a photographer and editor at the Palm Beach Post, Pittsburgh Press, Milwaukee Journal Co., and at two small newspapers in Indiana; The Republic and the Wabash Plain Dealer.

Todd Woody is an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 in San Francisco and writes for Green Wombat, a blog that covers the intersection of the environment, technology, business and policy. Woody formerly was the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley and worked as a senior writer and senior editor at The Industry Standard magazine in San Francisco. He covered environmental issues for seven years at The Recorder, a San Francisco legal daily, and wrote about the environment and technology from Sydney, Australia, for Wired magazine and other publications.

Joanna Yas is the editor of Open City Magazine & Books and a contributing editor of Moistworks, a music website. She also works as a freelance editor for a variety of publishers, and is a literature advisor for Creative Capital and The Kitchen. She lives in New York City.

Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer at The American Prospect. Currently, he is on-leave working on his as-yet untitled book about the Democratic Party’s search for a post-9/11 foreign policy that will be published by John Wiley & Sons sometime after he finishes writing it. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, Moment and other publications. He is a frequent commentator on radio programs around the nation and at one point was an infrequent television commentator until he said the cable news networks were doing “a terrible job” of covering the Terry Schiavo story live on MSNBC. Since that time, he has appeared on what he was assured was a major television network in South Korea.

Jeffrey Young reports on health care, lobbying and politics for The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress. He joined the publication in March 2005 from Health News Daily, an online health care policy and politics newsletter. Young graduated from the College of William & Mary with a degree in English literature and is a native of the Philadelphia area. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Shawn Zeller is a senior writer with Congressional Quarterly. He’s worked previously for National Journal and Government Executive magazines. He is a Harvard College graduate.

Cory Zurowski began his alternative newspaper career as a staff writer at Des Moines’ Cityview in the mid-’90s. He worked at AAN headquarters in Washington, D.C., as the association’s editor for about a year in 1998-99. He now raises magnolia trees and nutria at his bucolic abode in Stevensville, Md.