
Liam Beran
From left to right: Black Belt News publisher Cindy Fisher and Tucson Sentinel Senior Reporter Paul Ingram.
Paul Ingram, senior reporter at the Tucson Sentinel, right, gives Cindy Fisher, publisher of Alabama-based Black Belt News, tips on how to take better phone photos during a session.
Publications once seen as âalternativeâ to established dailies are stepping up, despite limited staffing and resources, to deliver news to communities that have lost their local news outlets.Â
The Iowa City-based magazine Little Village, for instance, has recently expanded its coverage to Des Moines, Dubuque, Waterloo and the Quad Cities, editor-in-chief Emma McClatchey tells Isthmus. Little Village was one of the more than 50 news organizations that attended the 2025 AAN Publishers (formerly Association of Alternative Newsmedia) conference July 9-11 at the Edgewater Hotel.
McClatchey says her six-person newsroom has made nitrate pollution in western Iowa a reporting focus, given its impact on water quality in-state and downstream for states along the Mississippi River. Some Iowans have taken to protesting events held by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds to demand the state address the nearly record-breaking contaminant levels.Â
âWe basically decided in the last year that water quality is the issue,â says McClatchey. âIf we covered nothing else at Little Village, we should cover that issue, because it's an existential issue in Iowa.â
Adds McClatchey: âThere just has to be someone blowing a whistle on that.â
Little Village publishes a monthly magazine, regularly posts arts and news stories online, and maintains a âfullâ online calendar, says McClatchey. Her biggest challenge is revenue and âgetting back advertisers who may have left during COVID or just trickled off over the years."Â
But readers have had a positive response to the magazineâs increased coverage of smaller communities.
âNow that we're in these other areas that are smaller, we might not have dozens of distribution locations there. But those [magazines] we do have are gone, because we have really loyal people who recognize us,â says McClatchey. âIt means a lot to these places to get coverage.â
A need to fill the hole left by legacy outlets â a Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News study released July 10 found that one-in-three U.S. counties do not have the equivalent of even one local journalist â was a frequent theme sounded by participants attending the conference, hosted by Isthmus. Other common challenges expressed by member organizations: the need for more revenue, the difficulty of covering communities with small staffs, and a never-ending news cycle.Â
McKenna Scherer, managing editor of Volume One, an Eau Claire-based media company and magazine that began as a black-and-white zine in 2002, says her biggest editorial hurdle is having âso much to do, not enough manpower and time.â On the business end, itâs âmaintaining and creating new revenue streams with the resources that we do have.â
But, Scherer says, given the dwindling resources available at other local outlets, Volume One has become âso relied upon.âÂ
Dylan Smith, editor and co-publisher of the nine full-time employee nonprofit online publication Tucson Sentinel, says itâs hard to pin down just one challenge facing his organization, but a lack of transparency from government officials is âbecoming a much greater problem.â Significant resistance from the second Trump administration to fulfilling public records requests has made reporting on border and immigration issues of key interest to Arizonan readers increasingly difficult.

Liam Beran
Various newspapers at the MadisAAN 2025 Convention.
Print editions continue to be a focus of member organizations from around the country.
âThey put up propaganda and very carefully calculated statements about things, but they donât actually provide real data, actual documents that we know exist, certain incidents,â says Smith. âThere are people who are picked up by ICE [U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] or border patrol or one of the various alphabet soup agencies in [the U.S. Department of Homeland Security], and they will never explain who these people are or why they were arrested.â
Session topics at the conference included, among other things, how news organizations can work with influencers, build internship programs, expand revenue streams, and prepare for legal threats in an âincreasingly hostile political environment for journalism.âÂ
During a keynote luncheon Thursday, Isthmus publisher Jason Joyce interviewed WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond about the organizationâs coverage of tech executives, the second Trump administration, and artificial intelligence. That evening, conference attendees got the chance to view the Wisconsin Historical Societyâs collection of underground and early alternative publications from the 1960s and '70s, one of the largest such collections in the nation.
Cartoonist Dan Perkins (a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow) on Friday emceed the annual AAN Awards and Honors Luncheon, at which Isthmus Sales Director Barbara Bolan won a Spirit of AAN award honoring those âwho went above and beyond in 2024 to help others in the industry or who significantly impacted their local community.â
Awards for Isthmus coverage included a first-place win in the âOnline Story Presentationâ category for a September 2024 article on how Wisconsinâs redistricted state legislative maps are affecting civic engagement. Local artist Emily Maryniak received an honorable mention in the illustration category for a December 2024 illustration that ran with editor Judith Davidoffâs story âThe selfish case for selflessness.â