For those of you who are interested, here’s an email I sent this afternoon to the Board of Directors providing an update on AAN’s meeting schedule.

Board Members:

Just wanted to let you know how our schedule is shaping up for the rest of the year.

The Medill Writers’ Conference will be held on Aug. 14-15 in Evanston, Ill. The Editorial Committee will also meet then and we’ll try to organize a Diversity Committee meeting while we’re there.

The Advertising Committee and Electronic Publishing committees have scheduled back-to-back meetings in New York on Sept. 18-19. Advertising is set to meet on the Friday afternoon and EP will meet on Saturday.

The Executive Committee will meet in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Oct. 2. And as you know, our board meeting will be held two weeks later, in Toronto, on Saturday, Oct. 17. We will make reservations for the board dinner at 7:30pm on Friday, Oct. 16 and the meeting will be scheduled the following day, from 9 to 4.

Although we don’t know yet which hotel we’ll be staying at, we do know that the meeting will be held in Toronto come hell or high water. So feel free to make your travel arrangements now. AND DON’T FORGET TO GET YOUR PASSPORT.

We recently conducted a survey of publishers who are likely to attend the next Publishers Conference, and their feedback has helped us narrow our search in terms of dates (the first two weekends in November, and the six weekends at the end of January and beginning of February) and locations (Charleston, S.C. and Monterey/Carmel, Calif.).

The winter timeframe for the Publishers Conference may not make sense if AAN West and/or a Web Publishing Conference are held during the same period, which will be determined next month at the latest.

I will be on vacation next week, but everyone else will be in the office in case you need anything.

Richard