They’re as different as night and day, but Jerry Brown and Bob Barr share at least one characteristic: Both are unconventional public servants who generally zig when others zag.
Now they have something else in common.
Oakland Mayor Brown will speak at the annual lunch meeting at AAN West, and former congressman Barr will serve as the keynote two weeks later at the first-ever AAN East conference.
Registration materials and program schedules for the two events, designed primarily for the training of rank-and-file staff, were mailed last week to AAN members. (Barr’s participation was confirmed after the materials were printed.)
AAN West will be held in San Francisco at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway. It will begin at 2 pm on Friday, January 23 and will end the next day at 5. AAN East unfolds exactly two weeks later at the Hotel Washington in the nation’s capital, beginning at 2 pm on Friday, February 6 and concluding the following day at 5. The lunch meetings will both be held on Saturday.
(For the AAN West schedule and registration information, click here, and for a PDF of the registration form, click here. For AAN East, click here for the schedule and here for the registration form in PDF.)
Brown served two terms as governor of California and in January, 2003 began his second term as mayor of Oakland. After seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1992, he hosted the popular radio program “We the People,” until announcing his campaign for mayor of Oakland in 1997. At AAN West, he will talk about crime.
Barr represented his Georgia district as a Republican member of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. A board member of several politically conservative organizations, including the National Rifle Association, and contributing editor for The American Spectator, Barr is also a practicing attorney and former prosecutor who has been an outspoken critic of the Patriot Act. He has written a column for AAN-member paper Creative Loafing since this Summer. At AAN East he will address the subject, “How the Neo-Conservative ‘War on Terror’ is a Danger to Every American.”
The regular programming for both conferences will follow the pattern set at previous AAN West conferences, with four separate streams for retail and classified salespeople, reporters and design and production personnel.
In the sales streams at both conferences, Mike Blinder will lead two half-day “Street Fighter” workshop sessions designed to offer both novice and experienced salespeople the skills to close business. Both conferences will also offer a variety of other sales-training presentations and breakout sessions.
The design and production streams will feature a variety of technical and creative seminars, focusing on Photoshop (Michael Ninness) and design strategies at AAN West, and ad design and Macintosh OS X (Chuck Weger) at AAN East. The ad design seminar at AAN East will bring the design and advertising streams together for a presentation by popular AAN speaker David Fowler.
The editorial stream at AAN East will feature nuts- and-bolts sessions on reporting led by Washington City Paper editors past (David Carr and Jack Shafer) and present (Erik Wemple), as well as the City Paper’s Eddie Dean and the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize- winning columnist Colbert King. The AAN West editorial program, which is not yet complete, will feature presentations by journalist and author Adam Hochschild, and Westword’s Patty Calhoun and David Holthouse.
