With growing competition from large media conglomerates, and with the Internet rapidly reshaping markets and media-consumption habits, alternative newspapers know they must change to remain competitive. But how? What's next in alt-weekly publishing? When AAN's annual convention gets underway on Thursday, June 16, programming will address such questions.
Thabi Moyo and Doron Monk Flake (pictured) won AAN's winter/spring 2005 Diversity Internship grants. Moyo, an aspiring cinematographer and photojournalist, recently completed her internship at Jackson Free Press; while Flake, lead singer of a rock band, covered arts and news for New Haven Advocate.
Current AAN Vice President and Membership Chair Kenneth Neill (pictured) is running for President, and several other seats are up for grabs. Voting will take place on Saturday, June 18, during the annual meeting on the final day of this year's convention. AAN News has put together this voting guide to help members get acquainted with the candidates.
A year ago, AltWeeklies.com was a fledgling Web site with just a hundred stories, intent on escaping the notice of many visitors besides the AAN editors who would buy and sell stories there. Now it is an active news site with more than 4,400 stories and a readership that is rapidly growing.
L.A. Weekly, Folio Weekly, Independent Weekly and The Texas Observer all had particularly strong showings in the 2005 AltWeekly Awards. The finalists in the 10th annual competition are listed here.
Months ago, AAN Editor Ruth Hammond was carried away by a flood of tearsheets and PDF files. She reappears with this behind-the-scenes look at the Alternative Newsweekly Awards contest, for which she's served as administrator and medic.
For years now, AAN.org has had interesting features and content, but a great deal of it was hidden behind an opaque interface. The redesign unveils these formerly hidden features; starting today, you should be able to figure out how to use them without an instruction manual. There's still work to do, but the redesigned site clearly is simpler, requires less scrolling, and offers faster access to important content. Also new: AAN Wire and the AAN Library.
