alternative media | AWN Weblog

By Mark Hanzlik, AWN Executive Director

I’m not sure what constitutes a veteran in the alternative newsmedia business, but I’m guessing Sarah Billingsley’s initiation at The San Francisco Bay Guardian in the 90’s qualifies. After 15 years of service to the alt industry including the last four years with AWN, Sarah announced her departure to pursue an opportunity with a Sacramento-based consumer research company. The field of research was something she’s been working toward for some time.

When Sarah joined our company in February 2008, she had recently returned to college to finish her B.A., and then began work on her Master’s in Communication, all while chasing advertisers, orders, artwork and revenue for AWN publications.

Sarah warming up for another AWN day

For those of you who have shared a cocktail with her at AAN conferences, responded to her numerous email inquiries, or chatted with her on the phone, you may already know she is a great communicator. Now in her absence, you’ll have the pleasure of communicating with our equally helpful support team (Lidia Stoian and Sheila Malone) or myself.

Sarah was an important player during a period of change for our company. In 2010, we moved in with the Sacramento News & Review on Del Paso Boulevard and revamped our sales approach. Armed with a background in ad sales management, she enthusiastically took over the primary sales communications role for AWN. Our list of active advertisers was still fairly sizable at that time, so Sarah recommended and we hired Cody Brill, our part-time Ad Coordinator. Last month, Cody also made a major career move as he landed a full-time ad coordinator post with a local business magazine. The two of them made for a wonderful one-two punch in managing the sales process.

Sarah, who was an early adopter and devotee of social media also wrote many of our sales and media blogs over the past few years. She also became our resident research expert for national alternative media data from The Media Audit that we managed on behalf of AWN.

So, if you’re looking for either one of them on the outside (not that working for AWN was a prison term folks), you’ll be sure to find Sarah or Cody easily on Facebook, LinkedIn, or elsewhere on the web. In the meantime, we’ll simply remember how much we enjoyed their company while they were here with us, wish them well, and we’ll continue to look for new opportunities to market our brand.

Sarah’s alternative media timeline:

San Francisco Bay Guardian (1997-2001)

Independent Weekly (2001-2002)

Sacramento News & Review (2003-2008)

Alternative Weekly Network (2008-2012)

By Mark Hanzlik, AWN Executive Director

Just five pages into the massive (132-page) report released by The Columbia School of Journalism Tuesday, you can quickly see there isn’t a cheerful ending to the story. If you haven’t noticed how chaotic and confusing the media business and journalism itself has become over the past few years, you must not have clicked on a web browser in a while. The Tow Center for Journalism report (available as a PDF document here) titled The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism focuses primarily on the economics of news organizations—large and small in the digital world. What’s occurring in the digital world can no longer simply be deemed an economic distraction for most media companies, it’s about dealing with the fundamental changes to the media business.

CJS In the report (the second released by this group), the authors pose a number of questions, many of which will not come as a surprise, but mostly you’ll come away with the feeling that no one really has discovered real solutions, sticky enough to lay a foundation for a solid future. They offer eight recommendations (listed in the release story posted here) which include some obvious points and some hard lessons that have yet to be learned by the Media. By reading this report, you’ll begin to understand some of the fundamental differences between traditional or “legacy” media models and some of the new alternative models which have already redefined terms like aggregation and hyperlocal.

For some of us in the business who have had our eyes on the prize and feet on the ground for some time, I say, it’s about time someone rounded up all of these bits and pieces and created a meaningful discussion that doesn’t carry favor toward any single idea or industry. The discussion here should appeal to a wide range of readers; media professionals, and anyone who wonders why their newspaper has shrunken in size and content, or has difficulty discerning between paid advertising and content on the flat screen in front of them.

The authors clearly support journalism in a general sense but have difficulty defining “digital journalism” and the elusive nature of the new world order that is driven by technological advances in communication that can easily outstrip mature media models. Thanks to these same advances, we’re now living in a experimental world. Our favorite media outlets will need to experiment in order to survive.

As you might have guessed, you can already read a number of observations of this new report throughout the web, some are reviews, some are news reports, and others are opinions. Besides, the source site mentioned earlier in this post, one blog post Future of Media: Lots of Questions, But No Easy Answers from Mathew Ingram on Gigaom.com may be worth another click.