Registration totals for AAN West and the Web Publishing Conference, which will be held next week in San Francisco, have far surpassed AAN projections. At 275 registrants, attendance at AAN West is already 50 percent higher than last year and the most it's been since 2003. And the Web Publishing Conference current total of 170 registrants is more than 40 percent above the final numbers from October 2006, the date of the first AAN web conference in San Francisco. There's still room for more if you would like to register. Although our room block at the Hotel Kabuki is already filled, they have a limited number of rooms available at prices that exceed the AAN group rate. Another option: The Kabuki has a sister property about two blocks away, Hotel Tomo, with lower online rates.

Continue ReadingConference Attendance Exceeds Expectations

Members have just over a week to enter the 2008 contest. Entries must be registered through the contest website by midnight EST on Fri., Jan. 25. Payments and hard copies of entries should be sent to Charles Whitaker, Northwestern University Fisk Hall,1845 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. Hard copies must be received at Northwestern by 5 p.m. on Mon., Jan. 28. For more information, contact contests (at) aan.org.

Continue ReadingAltWeekly Award Deadline Approaches

The early deadline is this Friday, Jan. 11; registration rates will increase by $50 the following day. The conference is slated for Jan. 30-Feb. 1 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco, and will feature programming on topics ranging from online metrics to social networking. In addition, two separate open discussions, one for editors and the other for web-tech personnel, will be added to the program next week after AAN conducts a survey of registrants to determine when to schedule them. You can register online by clicking here.

Continue ReadingWeb Publishing Conference Early Registration Deadline Approaching

AAN director of sales and marketing Roxanne Cooper and her assistant, Tiffany Kildale, resigned last week after accepting new positions with different employers. Cooper will be leaving AAN in February to take over as associate publisher of the Philadelphia City Paper, and Kildale departs next month to assume the position of meeting coordinator at the Chemical Producers & Distributors Association in Washington, D.C.

Continue ReadingTwo Veteran Staffers to Leave AAN

Due to a 2004 change in the association's bylaws, five papers that have taken on new majority owners in the past two years will have their AAN membership reviewed in 2008. The Membership Committee will evaluate The Other Paper, Boston's Weekly Dig, East Bay Express, Metro Pulse, and Cityview, and will issue a report to members a week before the 2007 annual convention. To retain their membership, each paper must be affirmed by at least one-third of the members voting at the annual meeting in Philadelphia, which is tentatively scheduled for June 7.

Continue ReadingMembership of Five Papers Up for Review in 2008

This Friday is the deadline for early registration for this year's AAN West conference, to be held in San Francisco Feb. 1-2. For AAN members, early registration is $75 per person (non-members pay $150). After Friday, both of those rates go up $25 per person. You can register online here. In addition to the four streams of programming (Business, Design & Production, Editorial, and Sales), the AAN West Planning Committee has some parties planned that are sure to please. On Friday night, the North Coast Journal will host a cocktail reception featuring the best in Northern California wine, cheese, and beer. On Saturday night, the San Francisco Bay Guardian will throw down at Element Lounge. Be sure to check the AAN West website for full details on events and programming, as well as updates as we get closer to February. The registration deadline for the Web Publishing Conference is Jan. 4.

Continue ReadingEarly Registration Deadline for AAN West is Tomorrow

Fifty alternative newsweeklies in the U.S. and Canada will publish stories this week to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol. The editorial package, conceived and shepherded by staff at Sacramento News & Review, includes a retrospective by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben commissioned by AAN, a look-back by Kyoto participant Ed Smeloff, a drubbing of ABC News Correspondent and global-warming skeptic John Stossel, and a look at the controversial views of Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. Many of the papers participating in the project are also contributing their own stories focusing on local climate-change issues. Sacramento News & Review Editor-at-large Melinda Welsh says the anniversary was "a chance to reveal to millions of alt-weekly readers how little distance we've traveled these last 10 years toward a solution to this giant problem we've created for ourselves and future generations." Links to Kyoto Protocol Anniversary stories may be found at kyoto.altweeklies.com.

Continue ReadingAlt-Weeklies Commemorate Kyoto Protocol Anniversary

The 2008 AltWeekly Awards is now accepting entries. AAN's Editorial Committee has made several changes to the contest. For the first time, all entries in the Writing categories must be submitted as URLs or PDFs. The contest will only accept hard copies of materials in the Cartoon, Special Section or Design categories. In addition, the committee added two new categories, Innovation and Public Service, and eliminated four others: Ad Design, Format Buster, Website Content Feature and Wild Card. In the Cartoon category, all entrants will compete in one division. The contest website will close on the contest deadline, Fri., Jan. 25, 2008 at midnight (EST).

Continue ReadingCall for Entries: 2008 AltWeekly Awards

AAN's Editorial Committee will continue to work with staff to select the categories each year and supervise the contest, while Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism will take over the day-to-day activities. AAN decided to look into having a third-party administrator after receiving record numbers of participating members and entries since the contest went online three years ago. Medill was a great fit, since the school already had a standing relationship with AAN. "Ultimately, I want people to think of AAN and Medill the way they think of Columbia and the Pulitzers or Harvard and the Nieman fellowship," says Medill professor Charles Whitaker, who will work with AAN editorial projects manager Heather Kuldell on the 2008 Awards to ensure a smooth transition.

Continue ReadingMedill to Administer AltWeekly Awards Contest

This year's conference will be held Jan. 30 to Feb. 1 in San Francisco, and is designed for alt-weekly publishers, editors, electronic publishing personnel, and any other employees with responsibility for their paper's website. After two "big-picture" presentations by the New York Times' Nick Bilton and Tacoda Systems' Dave Morgan, the conference will be dedicated to practical, nuts-and-bolts programming on topics such as user-generated content, online video, blogging, tagging and social bookmarking, search-engine optimization, web analytics, social networking, legal issues and the mobile internet. For more information, or to register, visit the conference website.

Continue ReadingWeb Publishing Conference Program Set