Last week, I attended the 2025 AAN conference in Madison, Wisconsin. AAN, formerly known as the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, is an international consortium of media outlets who, like the Reader, have roots in community and alternative news with many committed to embodying progressive politics and reporting on arts and culture in their local areas. The Reader was a founding organizational member in 1978 along with publishers like the Willamette Week (Oregon), Phoenix New Times (Arizona), and the San Francisco Bay Guardian (California).
It’s always invigorating to take a moment and talk to other people doing the hard work of bringing local journalism to the world. However, this conference is always particularly illuminating as the majority of the attendees have deep experience in exactly the kind of reporting, audience engagement, and publishing that we do at the Reader. They just do it from a different backyard.
I spoke to newspaper staff members from all over the country, including Florida (Orlando Weekly), Arizona (Tucson Sentinel), Vermont (Seven Days, Burlington Buzz), California (Santa Barbara Independent, Coachella Valley Independent), Mississippi (Mississippi Free Press), Maryland (Baltimore Beat), Iowa (Little Village), and Wisconsin (Volume One, Shepherd Express, and our conference hosts, Isthmus). And most everyone shared common struggles.
Revenue for media advertising is down. Readers are overwhelmed with news, getting inaccurate information from bad actors, and/or not making the leap from social media apps directly to our news websites. We had discussions about dealing with the constant and confusing deluge of federal disinformation and were delighted when one of the keynote speakers, cartoonist Dan Perkins, showed us that he’s decided to continually portray J.D. Vance as wearing a hotelier’s bellhop uniform “because it just feels right.”
Perkins, creator of the longtime comic strip This Modern World, testified to us that he owes both his career and his child to AAN. He was published early in his cartooning career by the Bay Area alternative publication SF Weekly and subsequently syndicated his strip to many alt-weeklies publishing in the 1990s. (He met the mother of his son at an early AAN conference and joked that his son “remains grateful to the AAN membership for his existence.”)
But back to the publishers: Even though there are so many obstacles in the way of our outlets’ success, so many of the publications represented at this year’s conference continue to both persevere and thrive. Isthmus, founded in 1976, is confident that they will hit their 50th anniversary next year after going through a conversion to nonprofit status in 2021 to save the paper. Little Village (a “mere” 24 years old this year) publishes a monthly print publication that averages 70 to 80 pages and is distributed to over 800 venues in Des Moines, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and other Iowa locations. And City, the independent publication of Rochester, New York, is celebrating 54 years in print in 2025.
It’s hard to do this work, but we know that reporting on local concerns with accuracy is a necessary art. Journalism is essential to our way of life. Solidify your support of local journalism by becoming a Reader member, monthly donor, and/or sharing our work with your friends today.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
