Eight of the prospective members are previous applicants, and two are owned by alt-weekly veterans who had been members during a previous association with different papers. AAN members will also be asked this year to evaluate Boston's Weekly Dig and Des Moines' Cityview, the first two post-sale newspapers whose membership will be reviewed under a process established in 2004 when the association's bylaws were amended. The fate of all of these papers will be determined at the organization's next Annual Meeting, which will be held in Little Rock on Saturday, June 17, the last day of the 29th annual AAN convention.
In September, two media entrepreneurs launched U Weekly, an arts and entertainment paper for students at Ohio State University. As reported in the New York Times, U Weekly has faced resistance from university officials and from Ohio State's traditional, student-run newspaper, The Lantern. The Lantern's faculty advisor comes off as savvy, however, remarking that "competition in journalism is good because it raises the bar and gets folks thinking about how to differentiate publications from others." U Weekly's owners have successfully launched college weeklies in Baton Rouge, La., and Lexington, Ky., but Columbus already has two alternative weeklies with entertainment coverage: The Other Paper and Columbus Alive.
