Project: Community Blog for June 2007 Convention

For the 2007 Annual Convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Portland, Oregon, we commissioned Ben Millen (arcticsounds.com) to create a community blog, with a web to print pdf export that created a micro-distribution print newsletter to pass around for convention attendees. This was a first for an AAN convention, and was accompanied by Twitter-fueled convention updates, a community Flickr account for convention attendee’s photos, and staff blogging to supplement community contributions.

I acted as community editor for the site, recruiting writers, doing backend administrative work and providing technical support to convention-goers, while AAN Senior Editor Jon Whiten acted as editor for the print newsletter.

Blog stats: Portland2007.AAN.org

• 8,000 pageviews in one month, with time spent at over 5 minutes
• 50 registered users from community, 15 who contributed

Community Newsletter
We envisioned a WordPress plugin that would enable us to export a pdf newsletter directly from the blog; eliminating the need for secondary formatting and the use of a layout program.

While this process was admittedly much more difficult than we first envisioned, we were able to create the first day’s newsletter with the buggy software.

Sketch of concept

Conceptualizing output

Sketch of desired layout

Editing an early version of the output