Nicole Aimone

I attended all three days of the 2025 AAN event, including a variety of events on each track for editorial or advertising. The events that stuck out the most for me were the vendor showcase, which allowed me to learn about programs and options to grow or change our processes to make them more efficient and effective, as well as those on building community events as part of your editorial process. That is something we have wanted to do for a very long time, and it gave us support and ideas and was incredibly inspiring.

Many of the connections I made were invaluable to learning new information about other publications and how they do things. This conference even inspired our staff to take a break from how we currently do things to innovate and implement objectives and methods we learned to add further value to our publication. It was also just incredibly inspiring to connect with other alternative publications and know that others are out there passionately fighting the good fight for non-mainstream journalism and that  there is a community of like-minded individuals.

Yes, absolutely! The AAN conference was one of the most impactful and informative professional development experiences I’ve had. I likely would not have had the funds to attend had it not been for this stipend.