NABJ intends to hold its annual convention and career fair in Tampa in 2009 and San Diego in 2010.

The Board of Directors chose to pursue final negotiations with the cities, both of which would host the associations signature event for the first time, at its Fall 2004 meeting in Washington, NABJ President Herbert Lowe said.

NABJ draws as many as 3,500 journalists, students and media professionals to its conventions and contributes millions of dollars in direct spending to the host cities. Each summer, the much-anticipated meeting draws major newsmakers and includes dozens of plenary and workshop sessions and hundreds of recruiters and exhibitors.

The 30th anniversary convention is set for Aug. 3-7, 2005, in Atlanta. The next meetings will be held Aug. 16-20, 2006, in Indianapolis and Aug. 8-12, 2007, in Las Vegas.

Among the most important duties NABJ's leaders perform is selecting where to hold our conventions, said Lowe, a staff writer at Newsday in New York. We are excited about Tampa and San Diego and confident they will be great places for us to showcase our quests for advancing media diversity and training.

The two cities survived a months-long convention site-selection process that included the Board considering a list of 27 cities last January. The Board narrowed that list to nine and directed its national office staff to conduct further research, site visits and preliminary negotiations with those cities convention and visitors bureaus and hotels.

In August, the Board selected Chicago, San Diego and Tampa as finalists to make formal presentations on October 8 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Chicago was chosen as the alternate for either 2009 or 2010 should the association fail to reach a final agreement with either of the other two cities, NABJ officials said.

Following the huge success 8,100 delegates at UNITY 2004 in Washington, NABJ will hold its 2008 convention jointly with the Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Native American Journalists Association. The UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. Board of Directors will choose that years site soon, officials representing the alliance said.

NABJ considers six key factors in choosing its convention cities: Can the city handle us? Will we have local corporate support? Is it someplace our members want to go? Is this a place that wants to have us? Can we afford it? Will it be a success?

All nine cities that made the cut in January met these criteria, said NABJ Vice-President Bryan Monroe, who helped to spearhead this years site-selection process along with NABJ Executive Director Tangie Newborn. In the end, however, Tampa and San Diego best met NABJ's financial and logistical needs for these two years.

The Tampa/St. Petersburg region impressed the Board with, among other things, its successful hosting of the 2004 Region IV Conference last spring.

The area boasts a vibrant local chapter that is already experienced in working with [the] national staff on big events and mobilizing support among local media, said Eric Deggans, president of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists and an editorial board member at the St. Petersburg Times.

The San Diego convention would be NABJ's third ever on the West Coast (following Los Angeles in 1990 and Seattle for UNITY 1999) and fifth (including Phoenix in 2000 and Las Vegas in 2007) not held in either the Eastern or Central time zones.

San Diego is ready and able to host the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, said Tim Carr, president of the San Diego Association of Black Journalists, NABJ's Chapter of the Year in 2003. Having the NABJ convention [in] Americas Finest City would be a major boost to the African-American community and the city as a whole.

Newborn said she would begin negotiating further with convention and hotel officials in Tampa and San Diego as soon as possible and aims by next year to announce actual meeting dates and hotel room rates after contracts are signed.

As always, we will work foremost to make our conventions affordable for NABJ and our members, Newborn said. We hope to attract record numbers to both cities.