General sessions and keynote speakers will be announced shortly.

Half Day Workshops
1.    Sales Training for the 21st Century Sales Force. We'll be asking tough questions, and have experts on hand to help you answer some of these questions: How do I remake my sales force? How is my new sales force organized? What tools will they use? Who are the sales managers of the future? Where do you find them? How do you motivate your sales staff? How does your new sales staff and management spend their time and resources?

2.    Web Design Trends. The web has finally developed to the point where stories can move beyond simple text and images. The advent of new technologies, like CSS3, HTML5, and web fonts, as well as the ability to use more sophisticated interactions, can help not only relate stories, but actually engage readers in a narrative. This workshop will not only teach you the basics of these new technologies, but also how (and how not) to use them to their best effect for your readers and your publishers. What do CSS3 and HTML 5 really mean? When do web fonts work best, and how do I choose them? How are web designers really engaging users through these methods, and are they right for me?

3.    Data Journalism. You don't need a degree in statistics or computer science to be an investigative journalist or even to do simple fact-checking. But with the increasing number of online data collection systems, tools, lingo and technologies out there, where do you begin and what stories can you tell? We'll help you take the first steps in understanding, finding and interpreting data and maybe even do a mash-up or two and create a visualization. We'll give you a set of replicable case studies and methods to get you going and tips on when to get a developer on board.

One to One Training (Available Thursday only)
SEO (One hour slots)
Your site, your webmaster and an SEO expert dedicated to helping you get maximum results through search engines and social media applications.

Social Media (One Hour Slots)
Sure, you tweet. You have a Facebook page. But are you using these tools and other in the best way possible? Come work with a social media expert to get the most out of your social media presence.

Sessions, by Program Track
Advertising
1. Coupon deal trends: Friend or Foe? Has this trend already been played in your market? Should you try to make a deal with one of the big providers like Groupon, a smaller company or develop a coupon program in-house?

2. The Skinny on Mobile: Mobile is here to stay and growing. What are the best sales strategies for a mobile audience? What is the real ROI? What pricing structures make the most sense?

3. Selling for a Multi-Faceted Media Company and Monetization Strategies for Social Media: Enough with giving it away for free. What are the best strategies for selling social media, bundling and other assets like slideshows, video and audio.

4. Top 2011 Advertising Trends: Gawker model, Self Service, Geo targeting, beyond standard sizes, neighborhood pages, display ad trends

5. Crossover and markets you aren't targeting but should from bar contests to fantasy sports and more.

6. Lessons from the Punk-Ass Kids: Media buyers still rule the advertising scene in large markets. Come listen to their success stories and failure.

7. Can Advertisers and Publishers Keep Pace with the Mobile Shift? What are the best tactics for staying current and not falling for passing fads?

8.  Real Time Bidding: another advertising wave of the future. Don't just dismiss this trend as something for the big guys. You can get in the game too...and probably should.

Business and Management
1. Use Your Community: Utilize your content and community to create new products that monetize and increase good will with readers.

2. No Stone Unturned: finding additional revenue from events, lifestyle publications to micropayments, donations and foundations.

3. Lessons from a CFO: We'll have a panel of CFO's from news organizations large and small discuss how to trim your budget and spend wiser.

4. Legal Panel: What can (or should) publishers learn from recent legal kerfluffles. We'll explore issues around online privacy, fair use and other pressing legal issues.

5. Staffing Trends: How do you make it work with a small staff while keeping morale high? What sort of trends are we seeing in our own papers and how does that compare with the rest of the media industry?

6. Strange Bedfellows No More: Partnering with mainstream media from the daily newspaper to the local public radio stations. Can it work? What does the partnership look like?

7. Resurgence and Reminders: Pew and other researchers are showing signs of business improvement -- what are we feeling on the frontline?  In the meantime, startups and heavily discussed local sites come and go, while we keep writing great stuff. Do we need to and how should we remind the public as well as our media writer counterparts?

8. Financial Standards: Presentation and moderated discussion of this year's annual benchmarking survey. (Closed session, open only to AAN members who participated in the annual survey.)

Editorial
1.  Long Form Journalism is Back…and you'll never guess who's reading it. And, there are new platforms for reading and showcasing it like Atavist, Kickstarter and Instapaper.

2. New and Improved Editorial Tools: There are yet another crop of fantastic and free tools that can help reporters of all skill level. Plus, some of your favorites have improved.  Come hear the latest from  favorites like Document Cloud, ProPublica, plus newer tools like Quora and LeNewz.

3. The New Census Numbers are Here: What findings should you care about? Where are the hidden gems? What are the stories altweeklies should be doing? What’s the best way to access them, and how can you do cool stuff once you have all that data?

4. Why are Your Readers So White? Are you writing stories that appeal to a broad, multi-cultural audience? Are you really? We’ll have a panel of minority readers and journalists talking about what they read and why.

5. Wikileaks and What it Means for Freedom of Information: Has the leaking of secrets through wikileaks stunted promised transparency? What can or should we do about it?  We'll have speakers from Sunlight Labs and the Sunshine In Government Initiative talking about this important issue, and show you where to get the best data.

6. Taking Story Reporting Beyond the Traditional Article Format and Conversational Journalism: Audiences are seeking an interactive, multimedia experience. How can you engage and effectively tell your story (without a huge influx in time and resources)

7. Hail Mary. More and more, we are asked to cover religious issues. How can we do so in a fair, non-derogatory way, without losing our voice?

8. When Democracy Crumbles -- Lessons from Wisconsin protests. Using the Wisconsin protests as a jumping off point, we’ll discuss how we cover big national stories for a local audience.

9. Covering Disaster -- Whether in our Backyard or Far Away. What is the alt-weekly role in foreign war coverage and commentary?

10. Editorial Standards: Publishers spend time and effort talking about financial standards, but what about the editorial standards we hold near and dear? Following up to last year's popular session, AAN editors will discuss how they look at investigative stories, op-ed pieces, arts and culture coverage, freelancers and more.
 

Online
1. Goals, Strategy and Tactics: A mobile development philosophy

2. Building an Open Source CMS: Update from Texas Tribune and Bay Citizen and the trends in open source software that you need to pay attention to.

3. Lessons from "The Daily": A much-heralded and well-funded tablet only product that is now losing traction only a few months after release. What can we learn?

4. Mobile Metrics for News Organizations: How do you track your mobile apps, and what numbers really matter.

5. Failure! What innovators learned from their mistakes and their suggestions for inexpensive things you be trying online.

6. SEO and SMO on a Shoestring Budget

7. Redesign Success Stories: Gambit mobile, Willamette Week and others will talk about choices made and challenges in their latest redesign efforts.

8. Coders are from Mars and Designers are from Venus: The Web fuses together the creative and technical processes. Learn strategies to inspire your right brain while exercising your left brain and how to manage staff that are on both sides.

 
We'll also have roundtables on a variety of topics including editorial standards, diversity, production issues, independent papers and more.