The judges came from academia and the newsroom, and they reviewed entries from as far away as Mexico City and Beirut. Many judges began their careers at an alt-weekly and several were fellows at the Academy for Alternative Journalism. A selection of their remarks on the winning entries has been compiled into a pdf document.
Starting this week, book reviews and profiles posted on AltWeeklies.com are also being featured on Indiebound.org, a website run by the American Booksellers Association. AltWeeklies.com content will appear, when it exists, on the information page for an individual book title. For examples of this partnership in action, click here and here.
Editorial Committee chair Julia Goldberg provides an update and a few videos from last weekend's committee meeting and Writers Workshop conference in Evanston, Ill.
Using the tags on your stories, the new widget, developed by DesertNet, pulls in similarly tagged stories from AltWeeklies.com, giving your website additional related links for particular movies, bands or issue areas. Click here, here or here to see it in action, and visit AltWeeklies.com for more technical information or to download the widget.
The annual workshop designed for alt-weekly writers and reporters is scheduled for Aug. 14 and 15 at the Medill School of Journalism on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Ill. Writers and editors from a number of AAN member papers will lead sessions covering everything from ethics to multimedia to political reporting, all in a way designed for staffers to get valuable, hands-on experience. Early registration rates are valid until Aug. 7, and the cut-off date to obtain AAN's discounted group hotel rate is this Friday, July 31.
AAN staff experimented with digital video at this year's convention and managed to capture several presentations and panels in reasonably presentable form. The videos are now available for viewing in the members-only AAN.org Resource Library.
"I felt like the kid who was the first to be picked for the school baseball team," See publisher Todd Kosloski says, describing how he felt at Saturday's annual meeting after his alt-weekly was admitted as an AAN member.
At the annual meeting of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies on Saturday, June 27, Willamette Week's Mark Zusman was elected the association's new president. He succeeds Metroland's Stephen Leon, who will take the advisory role of Immediate Past President. The membership voted on nine other board seats on Saturday, including two that were created just minutes earlier when AAN's bylaws were amended.
L.A. Weekly led the large-circulation division for the second year in a row with four first-place wins, while Santa Fe Reporter led the small-circulation division, also with four first-place wins.
At the annual meeting of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies this weekend in Tucson, AAN members approved the membership applications of Inland Empire Weekly of Corona, Calif., and Edmonton's See Magazine. In addition, the membership status of six current member papers that had changed hands in the last two years was affirmed.
