I was fortunate enough to spend the better part of a week in Madison, Wis., for the annual AAN Publishers (Association of Alternative Newsmedia) Conference, hosted by Isthmus, Madison’s longtime alt newspaper (which will be turning 50 next year).
Here are a few takeaways from the AAN Conference:
• The dedication to truth and resistance among independent, local news publishers remains strong. In various sessions, and during both keynotes—by Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine, and Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow), the brains behind longtime cartoon This Modern World (which you can read every Thursday at CVIndependent.com)—the capitulations by Jeff Bezos, ABC News and Paramount to the demands of the Trump administration were discussed and soundly condemned.
If you’re not reading Wired, you really should be. The publication’s political coverage has been second to none in recent months.
• It’s harder than ever to get information from the government—even records that should unquestionably be made public. There are public records and freedom of information laws at both state and national levels, but they have no teeth or means of enforcement—meaning government officials who ignore records requests are rarely punished.
Since Trump returned to the presidency, he’s been making it even harder for journalists and members of the public to get information. From laying off public records teams, to telling government employees they can’t speak to the media, to fighting public-information efforts in court, to even firing public records employees for doing their jobs, the Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to control all means of information dissemination, authoritarianism-style.
Yeah, journalists and members of the public can go to court to force the government to reveal information—but that’s time-consuming and expensive.
• While some local news outlets are doing well, others face significant challenges. While we were in Madison, we all learned that the 32-year-old Boulder Weekly, in Colorado, had been shut down—perhaps for good—after a dispute between the owner and the editorial staff.
During uncertain economic times, one of the first things businesses cut is advertising budgets—and some local news publications are feeling pinched.
• It will be a tad warmer at next year’s AAN Conference. The weather in Madison was, outside of a rain storm on Friday, lovely, with highs in the 80s.
In Madison, AAN announced the site of the 2026 conference. It will take place July 8-10, 2026 … right here in Palm Springs, hosted by the Coachella Valley Independent.
Shameless Self Promotion
The results of the national 2025 AAN Awards, for work done last year, were announced in Madison—and the Independent won two awards!
I won first place in the News Story—Shorter Form category, for “Legal but Unethical: Rep. Ken Calvert Has a History of Sending Taxpayer-Funded Campaign Pieces in the Days Leading up to Elections, Using a Congressional-Rules Loophole” (Aug. 18. 2024). The judge noted: “Even though FOIA couldn’t help you on this one, you did lots of great digging to illustrate this franking loophole. It’s one of those stories that makes you shake your head in disbelief — both at the action itself and the public officials’ ambivalence toward it. Makes me wonder which congresspeople from my state do the same thing.”
We won second place in the Online Story Presentation for “True Stories: The American Documentary and Animation Film Festival Is Bringing an International Slate of Movies to the Palm Springs Cultural Center” (March 7, 2024)
If you have the means to support this national-award-winning publication, please visit cvindependent.com/ support-our-publication.
Note: This is a slightly edited version of the editor’s note that appeared in the August 2025 print edition. Much of this was originally published online in the June 14 Indy Digest.
A Note From the Editor: Takeaways From a Gathering of Indie Journalists is a story from Coachella Valley Independent, the Coachella Valley’s alternative news source.