This morning's sessions have begun, and with them, the first full day of AAN's 32nd Annual Convention in Tucson is on its way. We'll have updates here at AAN.org over the next two days; for pictures of the confab, visit our Flickr page. To get short but sweet updates from various Twitterers here in Tucson, search for the hashtag #aan.

Continue ReadingAAN Convention Gets Rolling

We mentioned Lucian Truscott IV a few days back when looking at the Village Voice's complicated role in the watermark LGBT rights event at the Stonewall Inn 40 years ago. In a New York Times op-ed published yesterday, he remembers the scene and wonders why no one else covered it. "I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid ... even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story," Truscott writes. "Amazingly, there was no TV coverage and only a few paragraphs in the city’s daily papers. Myths and controversies have arisen in the vacuum left by the mainstream news media."

Continue ReadingWriter Remembers Covering Stonewall for The Voice

The U.S. is sending nearly 1000 athletes to compete in the Maccabiah Games, the event sometimes referred to as the "Jewish Olympics" that takes place next month in Israel. Jewish News of Greater Phoenix reports that one of the competitors is none other than Phoenix New Times senior staff writer Paul Rubin, who will be on the men's fast-pitch softball team in the masters division. It won't be Rubin's first time at the games; he's a veteran, having won two gold medals and one silver medal while playing softball for the U.S. in 1985, 1989 and 1993. "Representing your country and your religion is a very important honor, and I'm taking it very seriously," he says.

Continue ReadingWho Knew? Phoenix New Times Staffer Heads to the Maccabiah Games

"Yes, for all you haters out there, Tucson has shown itself capable of attracting somebody other than the Jehovah's Witnesses during the summer," writes columnist Tom Danehy. He then lets his readers know how to spot a convention attendee. "If you see a bunch of people who look like a renaissance fair collided with Woodstock, where the women resemble what Janis Joplin would look like today (dead or alive), and the men look like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (or at just about any other stage of his life)," he writes, "that's not the AAN convention; that's the Fourth Avenue Street Fair." For more on the convention from the Weekly's perspective, check out this week's media column.

Continue ReadingTucson Weekly Columnist Explains Alt-Weekly Types to Readers

Laurie Carlson says the Weekly has always had a different business model than most dailies, obviously, but also from alt-weeklies on the mainland. "A lot of weeklies were built on private party advertising, which we never had," she says, referring to the person-to-person classified ads that have dried up in recent years. She says the Weekly has been doing better than the local dailies, but has still had to cut staff this year and is running thinner papers. But, she adds, things seem to be looking level, if not up. "Other than January, when we took a terrible, terrible hit, this year seems to be normalizing," Carlson says.

Continue ReadingHonolulu Weekly Publisher: Business is ‘Normalizing’

The Tennessee alt-weekly celebrates the anniversary with a special issue with a number of essays looking back at how Nashville has changed in the past two decades -- and how the Scene has changed with it. "For our 10th anniversary issue, the Scene laid out an exhaustive history of how much the paper had changed in that brief, whirling, taken-for-granted decade," managing editor and longtime staffer Jim Ridley writes. "There's even more to cover now in the Scene saga -- a two-decade rollercoaster by which a local shopper transforms into a successful alt-weekly and ultimately a link in a national chain, while the media 'landscape' gradually comes to resemble the black-lighted computer ether-world of the '80s sci-fi fantasy Tron."

Continue ReadingNashville Scene Turns 20

That's the question Ryerson Journalism Review's Daniel Kaszor set out to investigate in that magazine's Spring issue. He sits down with independent owners Ron Garth of Vue Weekly, Michael Hollett of NOW Magazine and Dan McLeod of the Georgia Straight, as well as an editor with Eye Weekly, a corporate-owned weekly that competes with NOW in Toronto. His conclusion? "Readers may find it difficult to spot major differences between the two breeds of paper ... [b]ut there are distinctions," Kaszor writes. "Corporate papers are usually more personality-driven and apolitical. And the indies are not so much labors of love as pure acts of will held together by shrewd owners with deep personal and financial interests in their papers."

Continue ReadingWhat’s the Difference Between Canada’s Indie and Corporate Alts?