VOICES Publishing from the AAJA National Convention
Next year’s AAJA convention will be in the City of Brotherly Love.
The event will most likely be held in downtown Philadelphia, according to David Limm, the Philly chapter’s AAJA national board representative, who was briefed on the decision.
“I assume it might have something to do with Philly being a city in renaissance,” Limm said. “It’s also fairly accessible from a few other cities on the Eastern Seaboard.”
Officials often try to keep the location of the next convention location secret until it is officially announced toward the end of the Gala Scholarship and Awards Banquet on Saturday evening, but several people who were briefed on the issue confirmed to Voices that Philadelphia is the site. Last year, some members who lived in Las Vegas weren’t aware that the 2016 convention would be in their city until the gala announcement.
Hosting the convention in Philadelphia will be in line with AAJA’s tradition of rotating convention venues between the East Coast and West Coast roughly every two years. Last year’s convention was held in San Francisco. And in 2014 and 2013, the convention was in Washington and New York, respectively.
“We’ve held it on the West Coast for the past two years, so we’ve been thinking about changing the location to the East Coast,” said AAJA President Paul Cheung, who declined to confirm the convention site.
The AAJA Philadelphia Chapter is currently led by Juliana Reyes, a reporter at Technical.ly Philly, and Yowei Shaw, a freelance radio producer. The chapter has about 25 members.
Randall Yip, a former vice president of AAJA, said that the AAJA Philadelphia chapter is small, but that the organization has come to rely less on the local chapters for the convention. AAJA does not have a chapter in Las Vegas, site of this year’s convention.
AAJA has not held the convention in Philadelphia in the past three decades.
Earlier this week, AAJA did not disclose how many people were expected to attend this year’s convention, but as the cost of running the conference has gone up, it has been harder to make a profit off such events. Revenue generated from the annual conventions have been decreasing.
Last year’s convention in San Francisco brought in $16,174, while the 2014 convention in Washington lost money.
Philadelphia is home to the Independence Hall, where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and adopted, and the Liberty Bell, an iconic symbol of American independence.
