Street Sights Goes to Chicago and Wins Award

By Louisa Smith

On Thursday, July 28, seven representatives from Street Sights left T. F. Green Airport for Chicago, where the North American Street Newspaper Association (NASNA) conference was held this year.

NASNA, whose members include 31 street papers from the United States and Canada, was formed in Chicago 14 years ago, so this conference was a coming home of sorts for the Association. Its membership continues to grow, and this year representatives from several newspapers in their first year joined the veteran papers in Chicago.

StreetWise, Chicago’s street paper, is one of those veteran papers at 18 years old. The newspaper was the generous host of this year’s conference, and all who attended were lucky enough to get a tour of the StreetWise office, which is larger and more elaborate than we at Street Sights could have dreamed.

The Friday and Saturday of the conference were filled with training workshops covering a wide variety of topics. Since Street Sights was lucky enough to have seven representatives, we were able to attend the majority of them. Topics ranged from developing social media to creating a strategic plan, and we plan to use the knowledge we gained from these sessions as Street Sights grows in the coming year.

The low point of the long weekend came during NASNA’s general meeting on Friday, when the Board of Directors announced that, in this tough economy, there was no more funding to pay Executive Director Andy Freeze, who had become NASNA’s first paid employee twenty months prior. After much impassioned argument from the NASNA members present, the decision stood, and Freeze will be leaving at the end of the summer. Like many of its member street papers, including Street Sights, NASNA will return to being an all-volunteer organization until funding is restored.

Between meetings and workshops, Street Sights and the other papers got a chance to explore Chicago. The whole group watched the White Sox beat the Oakland A’s, and several of us took a ride in a water taxi around a Lake Michigan harbor and saw the beautifully lit-up Chicago skyline.

On Saturday night, the conference closed with a dinner and awards ceremony at the old Chicago Public Library, which has since transformed into the Chicago Cultural Center. The view of Chicago’s famous Millennium Park was breathtaking from where we ate on the fifth floor and listened to a keynote speech by Dr. Norma Green, who has been researching and writing about street papers since NASNA’s formation. Six papers were represented in the awards given out that night, and Street Sights was lucky enough to be one of them.  See the award winning story here.