At last week’s annual conference of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), Phoenix senior managing editor Clif Garboden was elected president of the AAN board of directors. He previously served a two-year term as vice-president and, before that, completed a four-year stint as chair of the admissions committee. AAN is an association of more than 100 alternative papers from across the US and Canada. Its membership encompasses weeklies of all sizes from media markets as diverse as San Francisco and Duluth, but it includes no community newspapers, dailies, or shoppers. AAN papers focus on providing a voice for their media markets distinct from that provided by the mainstream press. Garboden will serve out his two-year term from his full-time perch in Boston.