Julia Goldberg is the editor of the award-winning Santa Fe Reporter, heralded by a blogger in 2009 as one of the country's most "fabulous" papers, notably for its coverage of domestic violence and wild animals (as separate topics). Julia also serves as the editorial chair for AAN's board of directors.

Chip Scanlan writes and teaches writing at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fl.  He blogs about the writing life at "Chip on Your Shoulder." Before joining Poynter in 1994, he spent two decades reporting for The Providence Journal, St. Petersburg Times and Knight Ridder Newspapers. In 2004, he profiled "the best of the South's non-best-selling writers" for the Creative Loafing chain. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Washington Post Magazine and Salon.com. Two chapters from a memoir-in-progress about his grafting grandfather were finalists in the "Best American Essays" 2003 and 2004. He's revising his journalism textbook for Oxford University Press as fast as he can so he and his wife, Katharine Fair, can rewrite a script inspired by "The Holly Wreath Man," their serial novel published in more than 60 newspapers, hardcover and optioned for TV. Chip and Kathy live on St. Pete Beach, Florida with their three daughters. Sometimes, he even gets the clicker.

Robert Newman was most recently the design director of Fortune magazine and the creative director of Real Simple. He has also been the design director of Entertainment Weekly, New York, Details, Vibe, Inside, The Village Voice and Guitar World. Newman and his teams have won numerous publication design awards and medals. On his own he has worked with a wide array of magazines and newspapers, consulting on issues ranging from staffing to cover design to overall art direction. He is past president of the Society of Publication Designers, has been a frequent guest lecturer at the Poynter Institute, and speaks regularly to groups and conferences about publication design and art direction.

Tony Ortega became editor of the Village Voice in March, 2007. Previously, he was editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach, managing editor of The Pitch in Kansas City, associate editor at Phoenix New Times, and a staff writer at New Times Los Angeles. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Fatimah.

Sam Sifton is the culture editor of The New York Times, responsible for the coverage of arts and culture in all areas of the newspaper and on nytimes.com. He has held a number of positions at the Times, including editor of the Dining section and deputy editor of the Culture Department. Formerly a reporter, critic, and editor of the AAN-member weekly New York Press, he was also a founding editor of Talk magazine, and the author of a satirical guide to internet culture, "Stalking the Dot-Com Geek." He lives in Brooklyn.

Alice Neff Lucan has been AAN's legal hotline attorney since 2000. Her Washington, D.C.-based solo practice is dedicated to the representation of newspapers and press associations, along with an occasional author or commercial database. She was in-house counsel at Gannett Co., Inc. for 10 years, then of counsel to the Denver firm of Davis, Graham & Stubbs. In addition to her law practice, Lucan teaches Legal Aspects of Communications to graduate students in the master's program at American University's School of Communications.

Alden Loury is the editor & publisher of The Chicago Reporter. He joined the magazine in 1999 as a reporter and won local and national awards for his work examining the effectiveness of community policing and projects documenting racial disparities in drug sentencing, jury selection and jury verdicts. As senior editor from 2002 to 2007, Loury led more than 50 investigative projects examining the impact of race and poverty in lottery ticket sales, retail leakage in black neighborhoods, residential development surrounding the sites of demolished public housing and home mortgage lending, among others. He became editor and publisher of the magazine on Jan. 1, 2008. Prior to joining the Reporter, Loury covered government and social services for three years at The News-Gazette in Champaign, Ill. He also spent a year as a radio anchor and reporter for WDWS-AM in Champaign. Loury is a 1997 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A Chicago native, Loury grew up in the LeClaire Courts public housing development and the South Side’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.

Chip Scanlan writes and teaches writing at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fl.  He blogs about the writing life at "Chip on Your Shoulder." Before joining Poynter in 1994, he spent two decades reporting for The Providence Journal, St. Petersburg Times and Knight Ridder Newspapers. In 2004, he profiled "the best of the South's non-best-selling writers" for the Creative Loafing chain. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Washington Post Magazine and Salon.com. Two chapters from a memoir-in-progress about his grafting grandfather were finalists in the "Best American Essays" 2003 and 2004. He's revising his journalism textbook for Oxford University Press as fast as he can so he and his wife, Katharine Fair, can rewrite a script inspired by "The Holly Wreath Man," their serial novel published in more than 60 newspapers, hardcover and optioned for TV. Chip and Kathy live on St. Pete Beach, Florida with their three daughters. Sometimes, he even gets the clicker.

David Carr writes the Media Equation column for the Monday Business section of The New York Times that focuses on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The Times covering all aspects of popular culture. For the past 25 years, David has been writing about media as it intersects with business, culture and government.He began working at The Times in 2002 covering the magazine publishing industry for the Business section. Prior to joining The Times, David was a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. In 2000, he was the media writer for Inside.com, a web news site focusing on the business of entertainment and publishing. Before coming to New York, David served as editor of the Washington City Paper for five years. From 1993 to 1995, he was editor of the Twin Cities Reader and wrote a media column there as well. On August 5, 2008, David's book, "The Night of the Gun," came out on Simon and Schuster. The book is a memoir of addiction and recovery that used reporting to fact check the past. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey with Jill Rooney Carr and has three children. By the way, David will talk about anything, except the hardy AAN perennial, 'What is alternative?' He has no idea.

Erik Wemple has been editor of Washington City Paper since January 2002. During that stretch, he has also written the paper's regular media column and has regularly covered media outlets' adjustment to the internet. In 2005, his paper launched a staff blog, City Desk, that tilts at life in the District of Columbia. As of this writing, the blog has won no awards or recognition.

Jon Elliston is managing editor of the Asheville, N.C., Mountain Xpress. He is a former researcher for the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. -- the nation's leading nongovernmental repository of declassified documents. He has written two books, "Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda" (Ocean Press, 1999), and (with Kent Priestley) "North Carolina Curiosities, 4th edition" (Globe Pequot Press, 2007), as well as the 2004 AAN-commissioned investigative report on FEMA, "Disaster in the Making."

Jerry Portwood is the managing editor at New York Press, where he also assigns and edits the arts and entertainment sections of the paper. Previously he worked as an editor at Creative Loafing in Atlanta, before chucking it all and moving to Barcelona, Spain, where he freelanced and wrote fiction. Several of his short stories have appeared in literary journals, and he is currently at work on a novel.