Association News

If you thought your daily AAN.org newsletter looked a little different this morning, you were right. AAN has transitioned the daily and weekly AAN.org emails from staid plain-text to rich HTML. Newsletters for AltWeeklies.com will soon make the same switch, once the site redesign is complete. To sign up for daily or weekly AAN newsletters or to update your preferences, click here (if you are an AAN member) or click here (if you aren't an AAN member).

This year's AAN West conference was organized a bit differently than years past: A committee of AAN members in Northern California did most of the heavy lifting, and they've put together a wonderful staff training program that includes business, design & production, editorial, and sales tracks. "The committee's focus was on staff training and providing an opportunity to network with others in the alt-weekly world," says the News & Review's Deborah Redmond, who chaired the committee that organized the event. The conference will be held Feb. 1-2 at the the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. The early-bird registration rate is only $75 for AAN members and $150 for non-members (the rates increase by $25 after Dec. 7). Hotel options include the Cathedral Hill Hotel and the Kabuki Hotel (formerly the Miyako), which is also the site of the Web Publishing Conference that will immediately precede AAN West. (AAN members can also register now for the Web Publishing Conference, although the complete program won't be announced until next month.)

The ten young journalists who spent eight intensive weeks this summer at the Academy for Alternative Journalism at Medill School of Journalism were among the best that program director Charles Whitaker has seen, he tells AAN News. Two of them have already been offered jobs by AAN papers. This year also marks the first time the fellows have produced a website, rather than a print product. Whitaker says he hopes to grow the website as an alumni resource over the coming years.

Over 150 AAN member delegates and film industry types converged last Thursday at the Avalon Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles for TrAANsformers, an event designed to demonstrate gratitude to film ad-buyers for their support. Twenty-seven door prizes, all donated by AAN members, were handed out, including a Mexican Riviera cruise and an "Apple" fruit basket with an iPhone, an iPod Nano, and Apple TV. During the two hour event, attendees noshed on sliders and other hors d'oeuvres and drank from the hosted bar, but the party didn't end there. "One of the best signs was that both guests and AAN paper folks hung out way after the free booze was gone and the presents had already been doled out," says The Stranger publisher Tim Keck.