Conferencing: A trip to Grand Targhee

Two weekends ago, I was in Grand Targhee, Wyo., to present a paper at the 23rd Visual Communication Conference.
While conducting research is not part of my job description, I occasionally write a scholarly article for publication in journals or to present at an academic conference. Tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW are required to publish, but I do it just as a mental hobby to keep my brain functioning at an acceptable level.
What I've discovered about academic writing is that it's a lot harder to get published in a journal than it is in a newspaper or magazine. Before coming to UW, I did a fair amount of freelance writing and had stories published in such places as the Boston Globe newspaper and Fly Fisherman magazine.
Those stories were probably read by thousands, possibly tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (in the case of the Globe). In contrast, an article in a scholarly journal may attract an audience measured in single or double digits.
So figure out why there is so much prestige in being published in academic journals. Never have so many worked so hard and stressed so much for so little audience.
In any case, my paper was entitled "Tapping the Collective Unconscious on Page One: Two Case Studies of Traditional Community-newspaper Flags." The study looked at the flags of the Glenrock Independent and Guernsey Gazette, both weekly newspapers in Wyoming. The research applied Jungian analysis to try to explain how the artwork in the two flags taps into the collective subconscious of readers in both towns. If interested in the details, here is a link to the article.
I kind of felt like a dinosaur at the conference, where many participants were exploring some cutting-edge, 21st-century topics such as visual memes, technology dissection, veromones, Second Life, etc. The Viscomm conference attracts a wide range of experts, including journalism faculty and grad students, artist types, and other educators and researchers.
The COJO Department hosted the conference this year, and three of our graduate students and four of our faculty presented research at the conference. Although it rained three of the four days, Grand Targhee was a beautiful, visually stimulating locale for the event. The highlight for participants was a cookout at a local dude ranch that included wagon rides through herds of elk and bison.
For people who came from as far as California and Rhode Island, Viscomm 23 was about as Western as it gets.