Moderated roundtables with topics that focus on business issues.

Moderated roundtable discussion that will focus on design issues.

Cultivating the Online Culture: How can editors lead their newsrooms from being once-a-week producers to reporting and writing on a more daily schedule? Moderator: Matt Kettmann, The Santa Barbara Independent

Mister Publisher, Tear Down That Wall! As alt-weeklies continue to adapt to new models, what is keeping editorial from listening to the ad department more, and vice versa? Why doesn't the ad dept take more leads from edit? In a Web 2.0 world, has the wall become lower already? Can't we just smash through it altogether? Moderator: Jeff Lawrence, Weekly Dig

Survey Says...: Online tools allow us to create and distribute surveys to our readers, to "listen" to them on Facebook and Twitter, and to invite them participate in crowdsourcing our stories. We can collect and collate their feedback in all sorts of interesting ways. So what are we asking them? And what do we do with that information? At this roundtable we'll discuss creative and practical ways to gather and use reader feedback. Please bring ideas, success stories and cautionary tales. Moderator: Cathy Resmer, Seven Days

We're not talking about just any old roundtables here. We're talking Bryan Adams, Canadian-rocker, pull-out-all-the-stops style roundtables. We're going to rock your advertising world with our 15-minute round-robin discussions that allow you to sit in on all three topics and learn:
• How Salt Lake City Weekly built a list of 20,000+ subscribers to five newsletters that sell out each week.
• How East Bay Express leverages beer sales sponsorships to yield 50k in revenue -- and has beer companies clamoring to get on board.
• How NOW Magazine developed an incredibly successful revenue niche in brokering pre-printed inserts.

Fran Zankowski will moderate discussion of this year's annual benchmarking survey. (Closed session, open only to AAN members who participated in the annual survey.)

Four months before a Toyota Lexus accelerated out of control in California and killed four people -- ultimately resulting in Toyota's recall of millions of cars -- Houston Press staff writer Paul Knight published his investigation into unintended acceleration of the Toyota Prius. Although the Prius was the darling of the environmentally conscious, Knight had started hearing accounts from owners that their cars had gotten away from them and in some cases crashed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had done a few brief investigations and found nothing while Toyota was claiming either driver error or loose floor mats were the culprits. As Knight's story demonstrated and now as the world knows, that was not the case. In this panel, Houston Press Editor Margaret Downing and Paul Knight will discuss the reporting methods used to produce this piece of journalism.

Newsroom staffing levels, freelance pay rates, page counts--this session is about the nitty gritty. In advance of this editors-only session, AAN editors will have the opportunity to fill out a survey that addresses various benchmarks, as well as queries about how they deploy their resources. The survey will ultimately be collated and available in the AAN resource library as an editorial standards document. The session will consist of a lively free-wheeling discussion about how editors are using their budgets and staffs with the goal of generating new ideas and inspiration.

Convention what? No, there's no water or goldfish or tiny castles involved, just the unleashed creativity and knowledge of convention attendees. Various forms of "unconference" sessions have become de rigueur at conferences of late, and for good reason: attendees have a lot to offer and interaction enhances learning. Although AAN has a tradition of offering "unconference-type" programming, we'll take it a step further with the fishbowl. Or fishbowls. Attendees will have a chance to submit discussion topics on Thursday and Friday. A facilitator will review the ideas in advance and assist attendees in forming groups and determining the exact style of the fishbowl. There may be one, there may be several. There may be flipcharts, there may not. It may run longer than 4:45 pm. It's up to you! What better way to wrap up the 2010 Convention