Thursday, June 14

3:00-4:15
WORD OF MOUTH AND COMMUNITY BUILDING FOR ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPERS
Viral marketing, buzz marketing, word of mouth: today, it's all about using your current readers to be advocates for your business. Learn how you can use the power of viral marketing to build your circulation, develop more loyal readers, and provide added value to advertisers.
Speaker: Kim Sheehan, Univ. of Oregon

4:45-6:00
SMART HIRING: ATTRACTING AND CAPTURING THE BEST
Finding the right people for the right jobs at the right time can be an ever-exasperating puzzle. Learn effective ways to recruit and engage the talent that you need. Laura Dell will explore the challenges alt-weeklies face in building their workforce, and offer some concrete strategies for expanding the pool of candidates and for selecting and hiring the best.
Speaker: Laura Dell

Friday, June 15

10:00-11:15
FINANCIAL STANDARDS REPORT
Financial consultant Seija Goldstein will present the results of the annual benchmarking survey. (Closed session, open only to AAN members who participated in the annual survey.)
Speaker: Seija Goldstein

11:45-1:00
FINANCIAL STANDARDS ROUNDTABLES
Following Ms. Goldstein's presentation, participating papers will discuss the numbers in an informal setting, with an emphasis on sharing ideas about how to reduce expenses.

LEVERAGING THE WEB TO IMPROVE YOUR OPERATIONS
There's more to the web than just websites. As print growth slows, you can also use the Internet and other new technologies to gain operating efficiencies that will help to sustain profitable growth. Hal Smith will demonstrate how to develop effective sales and marketing websites for business-to-business use; digitize internal operations from contracts to invoices; network sales reports and account management systems; create a virtual ad-rep structure and intranet to improve internal communications; and use GPS to track print circulation.
Speaker: Hal Smith

3:00-4:15
MAKING DECISIONS IN A COMPLEX AND CHANGING MEDIA MARKET
The media landscape is changing. How do publishers adapt and exploit new opportunities? In a disruptive environment it's important to understand the big picture and communicate it throughout your company. Terry Garrett will help you do that by clarifying the most critical aspects to consider about your organization and the market so you can make innovative decisions and engage your staff. Learn how to assess where you are and what you can do to slow the world down long enough to figure it all out.
Speaker: Terry Garrett

4:45-6:00
MAXIMIZING COLLECTIONS
Are too many of your sales going straight to the receivables list -- and staying there too long? An expert collections agent and a panel of AAN publishers and business managers will address all of the elements of a successful collections program, including: training sales reps to establish a payment relationship at the point of sale; using prepayment discounts as an incentive; preventing billed clients from backsliding; handling loyal clients with poor cash flow; and determining when and how to send an account to a collection agency.
Moderator: Stephen Leon, Metroland
Panelists: Noel Mermer, Charleston City Paper; Craig Dickelman, Athens News; Steve Delgado, Portico Publications

Saturday, June 16

10:00-11:15
ONLINE EVENT LISTINGS: Best Practices and Solutions
A number of well-capitalized competitors -- including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo -- have turned their attention to the online distribution of event information and to the formation of social-networking tools that aggregate events, store online calendars and build online interest groups around events. AAN commissioned Todd Stauffer to review the state of the art in online event listings to help AAN members defend their turf from these behemoths, as well as a number of start-up competitors. In this session, Stauffer will suggest best practices for presenting online events; recommend tools to enhance the distribution of event information online while facilitating a web-to-print workflow; and propose technology standards for integrating event content into popular social-networking tools.
Speaker: Todd Stauffer, Jackson Free Press

11:45-1:00
POYNTER EYETRACK07
How do people read a newspaper? How is that different from how they use a website, and how should those differences inform your work? Sara Quinn will answer these questions and more in this presentation of the results from Poynter's major eye tracking study of print and online news reading, in which 600 readers were tested to make comparisons between tabloid, broadsheet and online formats. Find out how various story and visual forms engage readers and help them better comprehend what they've read.
Speaker: Sara Quinn, Poynter Institute

PUBLISHERS' ROUNDTABLES
Topics TBA.