Inspiration can sometimes come from the most unexpected places.

Last weekend, The Atmore Advance was in attendance for the 2018 Alabama Press Association’s Summer Convention at Perdido Beach Resort in Orange Beach.

Every year, the APA holds the convention so that representatives from newspapers, magazines and websites — mainly publishers and some editors — can get together to attend forums, conference panels and the like.

This year, the convention featured political forums and media sales presentations from Ryan Dohrn.

The political forums included candidates running for lieutenant governor, attorney general and governor. Democratic candidate Walt Maddox was the lone candidate for the gubernatorial forum.

Intermingled throughout the convention, the APA made sure to keep us full with good food and watered despite the tremendous gulf heat.

Prior to the convention, newspapers, magazines and websites were given the opportunity to submit entries for the Better Newspapers Contest. The BNC is divided into several categories for publications to submit what they think the best was from the previous year. The kicker is that sometimes the category covers a certain time frame in the year, which makes it interesting because it keeps publications on their toes to spit out good content every day/week.

The Atmore Advance won second place in the best use of social media category.

The convention wraps up on Saturday night with the awards banquet, when all first-place BNC winners are announced, along with the category winners for best of the year selections.

The banquet ended and publishers, editors and owners filed out to a reception for the winners.

Another convention ended and newspapers and other publications are on the verge of starting the last half of the year.

What content will they bring to the table and next year?

By the way, inspiration did come to this publisher.

“Let’s get to work,” I said.