Due to potential weather-related mail delays, the deadline for hard copy submissions has been extended to Tues., Feb. 16. Entrants submitting payment with their entries will also have until that date to submit payment.

Three AAN members took home plenty of awards in this year's New England Newspaper and Press Association Better Newspaper Contest. Boston Phoenix staff writer Mike Miliard was named Weekly Journalist of the Year (judges said he was "obviously a very versatile and talented journalist") as part of the Phoenix's haul of 18 total awards, including 11 first-place wins. Worcester Mag took home nine awards, with five first-place finishes, while Burlington's Seven Days finished first in three categories and won seven total awards.

The application deadline for newspapers to apply for AAN membership has been extended two weeks to Feb. 19. You can download an application here, or contact AAN to have one mailed to you. Find out more about admission guidelines and membership requirements here.

As AAN papers scramble to meet the Feb. 8 deadline for the 2010 AltWeekly Awards journalism competition, entrants should know that several of the winning entries will be published in book form in 2011. AAN has just signed a contract with Northwestern University Press to publish a book titled Best AltWeekly Writing 2009 and 2010, which will feature a selection of first-place winning pieces from several categories, as well as a number of "How I Got That Story" interviews with winning authors.

Entries must be registered through the contest website by 11 p.m. EST on Monday, Feb. 8. Each entry must be registered online, regardless of whether the material itself is being entered in PDF or tearsheet format. Hard copies and payment must be received in the AAN office by 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 11.

Scores of alt-weekly staffers descended on San Francisco's Argonaut Hotel last week for AAN's 2010 Web Publishing Conference. Publishers, editors, ad sales managers and others came together for one-and-a-half days of virtually non-stop panels and presentations on how best to manage digital publishing now and in the future. If you weren't able to make it to the conference, or want to share what you learned at a particular session, you can check out videos from nine of the 12 sessions and PDF presentations of several sessions in the Resource Library.

The latest installment in AAN's 2010 Sales Webinar Series will focus on "tips & tricks" for Google Ad Manager (GAM). The session, which costs $24 for AAN members, will be led by Mark Wolly, Senior Ad Serving Consultant with Google Publisher Solutions. He will point little-known (yet high-impact) features of GAM, introduce some brand new features and spend plenty of time answering questions on how you can optimize GAM.

As Toyota acknowledges design problems with the brakes in its hybrid Prius, it's worth taking a look back at Paul Knight's April 2009 story that ran in the Houston Press and several other alt-weeklies, which details the car's "unintended acceleration" problems. "Toyota spokespeople quoted in the story blamed misinstalled floor mats and simple driver error for the wild rides," reports the OC Weekly, which also ran the story. "But now that the U.S. and Japanese governments are applying heat, the world's largest carmaker seems to be taking Prius horror stories more seriously."

"I hear all the time from people who are just starting out who want media careers, who want to be writers, who want to broadcast," The Stranger editor and "Savage Love" columnist says in an appearance on the Too Beautiful To Live podcast. "Then the next thing out of their mouth, when they're applying for jobs, is that they need $60,000-$70,000 a year. I laugh and look at them and say 'The first three years that I did the column I got nothing." Savage adds: "There's no job in media for anyone anymore who isn't willing to do it for free at the outset." You can listen to the entire show, where Savage discusses everything from Dr. Drew to monetizing his "Savage Love" podcast, here (Savage comes on in the second half).

Mobile publishing company Verve Wireless today announced its end of year milestones, noting that 100 million mobile news pages were served in December 2009 -- a 160 percent increase year over year. The company says local news continues to be the most accessed mobile content, but that breaking world or national stories -- like the death of Michael Jackson, for example -- are driving the largest traffic spikes. Verve also notes that mobile video is a growing field, with viewership growing by 106 percent in the past three months.

Mara Shalhoup, who was named the paper's new editor-in-chief last month, says she hopes to eventually bring back the investigative pieces and longer stories that have mostly disappeared from the alt-weekly. "The in-depth, investigative pieces, they take time, and they take resources, and right now those are two things that can be of short supply," she tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We were under the gun to build page views and have a bigger presence online. We couldn't do both at the same time." Shalhoup also notes that she will likely be hiring more staff soon, a move that CL's new ownership team says it fully supports.

"Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate." This Voice headline on the day after Brown won the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy caught the eyes of many observers at the time, and now the president himself has referenced it. "There was apparently a headline after the Massachusetts election," Obama said in remarks to Senate Democrats, according to Talking Points Memo. "The Village Voice announced that Republicans win a 41-59 majority. It's worth thinking about. We still have to lead."

A California appellate court has ruled that a lawsuit by indie rock musicians against Rolling Stone over an article that was surrounded by a fold-out ad for Camel cigarettes should be dismissed under the state anti-SLAPP statute. AAN, along with several other media organizations, filed an amicus brief last summer in support of Rolling Stone in the case.